Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Good or Bad?

AI has been very much in the news recently and its use (or potential use) seems to be increasing at breakneck speed.

There are plenty of serious discussion points about the subject on the web. However, with any newly emerging technology, many are based around how much money can be made from AI.

One such example is the announcement by Open AI, the people that bought us ChatGPT are now looking to raise an eye watering investment capital of $30 billion ! I personally don’t think they will have any trouble finding that as the world scurries along the AI discovery path.

That said, there are numerous voices that have raised concerns about many aspects of AI, such as the ethics behind its use. Let’s ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help understand more by asking it to write something about AI and ethics.

Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 2 seconds for the response to appear!

Could I have written a better opening? This leads on to writing in general, with this AI capability how will we know who (or what) has written the text that we are reading or whose opinions we are being subjected to. We are constantly having discussion about how much Social Media influences our live. How much will AI influence them. Here’s another interaction with ChatGPT, this time about Cyclists and Car drivers.

Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 15 seconds for the response to appear!

Was this something I could have read in a newspaper/magazine/book? How good was its writing, did it copy something from the internet or was it truly a unique piece of work created by an AI.

Out of interest, I used a number of tools to check spelling, grammar, reuse and finally loaded it is to Word 365. Using Word’s latest spellchecker, apart from one small conciseness error, it reported it could not find any similar written piece on the Web.

Only one error found, but no copies found online!

This brings us on to another aspect of the use of AI that have many of those in education seriously worried. How will they be able to judge Students contributions when hand in their work and this is not something new!

The conversation has a long way to go, I think.

I was looking at some other aspects of AI and came across a number of newly released AI’s that can generate Art on request! One I that I looked at with amazement was DALL·E2, which is another AI from OpenAI’s stable of AI tools. This and similar AI’s raise a whole series of questions around Copyright.

Who owns the copyright for AI generated images? The original artist, the AI, the person who commissioned the artwork, i.e. the person using the AI? It seems to be a bit of a minefield! Here’s a few articles on that subject.

Here’s some of the art that I had DALL·E2 generate for me from a simple one line description.

Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!

It’s one of those sites you could really spend time on, I did for a while!! But it is amazing what can be achieved with a few simple instructions. Art creation may never be the same again!

That said, Ai is here to stay and is already in use in a number of areas that you may not have released that you probably touch on a daily basis.

There will be many benefits (and drawbacks) from the use of AI in our lives. However, it is absolutely right that we need to question the advances and make sure that we control the AI’s before they have the ability to control us!

UK copyright under attack!

Under proposed new legislation contained in the recent Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Ascent last week, you may end up not retaining the copyright of all the photographs that you take.

Here’s some more detailed information about this from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. As usual, the changes to the UK Copyright Law are buried in the main act and only now are seeing the light of day.

What to do? I’ve written to my MP about the changes, you can do the same using the Write to Them website to make your feelings known.

It seems the UK government is more interested in protecting the copyright of large media corporations (mostly USA based) than UK individuals copyright.

This is not right and need to be changed.

Copy of Letter to my MP.

I am sure that you will have seen some of the press coverage about this yesterday and today, such as from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. I cannot understand why the UK government seems so intent dismissing the copyright of creators of photographs. Yesterday I took a picture of a plant in my back garden. That image is mine and will always be so.

However, now that I have loaded this into social media and some of the Metadata has been stripped off – by them, it may be considered an ‘orphan’ work by some and according to my understanding of the potential legislation, available for reuse and profiteering by others without a single royalty payment being made to me. Surely this cannot be right?

Why does the UK government want to take away my copyright, yet seems so eager to legislate for big media (usually USA based) organisations to keep their copyright. These changes to copyright law will put the UK out of step with may other countries and I cannot understand the logic in the changes.

I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this and if you agree with the intention to strip my rights to copyright away.

I’ll also post any reply I get.