The point of Communism in its idealistic, not its practiced, form is that each person puts their shoulder to the wheel according to their own strengths for the benefit of the whole of society. The reward is the harvest or the car that is produced, not an increase in income or status for the worker. Communism is the ultimate challenge to the ego. When its ideals are put into practice there is often a grotesque and destructive outcome. The only place I’ve seen it practiced successfully was on a kibbutz in Israel. The world of AI technology goes beyond Communism. There is no author, artist, photographer, speechwriter involved, no entity with an ego. All blame, praise, or prosecution falls into a void. The whole idea of AI is that what I do, make, or create belongs to nobody.
My publisher recently tried (I hope only “tried,” we’ll see) to sell my voice to an AI group. Until very recently, selling an author’s voice had not been possible, so the don’t-sell-my-voice clause wasn’t in our original contract. The publisher is probing to see what they can get away with before courts sort things out.
Let’s say my voice is sold. An icon will appear on the AI company’s website, and clicking on it will produce a sample of my voice. Using text they or the website provide, customers could click on the “ANN” icon and my AI manipulated voice would read their text. The company promises that the chosen voice will read a whole book if you like. Such feats have been predicted only in the wildest reaches of science fiction. The AI company proposes to offer no royalties for the use of my voice.
Until the courts stopped it, nascent technologies of the early 2000s allowed people to download songs without paying a fee. Courts ruled this illegal, but musicians are still fighting invasive technologies to retain sufficient profit. Musician friends who were outraged and depressed in the early 2000s are still outraged and depressed. All that work for nothing.
One judge has ruled that photographs created with AI are not entitled to copyright. If that trend continues, then books or poems or songs written with ChatGPT or another service will also not be entitled to copyright and could be used free, or for the profit of anyone who can market them better than the AI manipulator could.
Someone asked Truman Capote what he thought of a certain book, and he said, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” Why would someone spend all that time typing a terrible book? The point of using ChatGPT would be to lessen the time necessary to write a terrible book, some of which sell very well, by the way. The trap in all this is the impossibility of knowing something was created by AI. Even if there is a law requiring the posting of an AI notice, a person in Katmandu or Ouagadougou or any other place outside the reach of the American legal system could publish the work worldwide without risk.
Already, in my emails and texts, I am forced to separate out the fakes. No technology company is taking it upon itself to provide that discipline, though surely there are ways of doing so. It’s caveat emptor all the way down, except that there’s nobody to prosecute if one evening you give away information or pay someone money because you’re too tired or sick or old or mentally challenged or inexperienced to notice the fake. The risks are all on the buyer.
Perhaps it all comes down to the philosophy that rules American commerce of all sorts—the consumer comes last. Maybe that is the poison that will rot the system.