Is Artificial Intelligence Dangerous? Effect on Copyright!!

Is Artificial Intelligence dangerous? This is a crucial topic! Like today’s internet, it has a good and bad side, so it really boils down to creating tools that help us develop better models.

Artificial Intelligence has current impacts on society, including contributions to climate change, the use of data without consent, and potential discrimination against communities.

The internet was once thought to be deadly and would wipe out humanity. They weren’t wrong. Most of us have a screen in front of us 90% of the day. Artificial Intelligence will take us further down this rabbit hole, not because it is inherently bad but because humans lack self-control. Ultimately, the problem with Artificial Intelligence is not that it becomes sentient, but that humans use it in malicious ways.

If a person or group of people has ingrained bias in them, Artificial Intelligence will merely reinforce their views if the results are in line with their thinking. Or just brush off the outcomes if Artificial Intelligence generates contradictory information, even when supported by references. Artificial Intelligence can be a dangerous tool if used by a person or group of persons with a closed mind and questionable moral compass and ethics.

The bit about Artificial Intelligence (and other technologies) that concerns me the most is the free-for-all personal data harvesting by corporations without any laws to control what they do with it. Only the EU has taken some steps to control this (GDPR), but no other nation protects the privacy of our data. These corporations are free to collect, correlate, and sell our profiles to anyone. Artificial Intelligence will enable data profiles that know us better than we know ourselves, all in a lawless environment.

Good Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Carbon Emissions

When utilizing these models to calculate carbon emissions, we also need to account for the time that people save. I know this is a hard metric, but if, on average, a person saves 5% of their time in front of a screen while using Copilot, this is a huge benefit to the environment. Emissions caused by training Artificial Intelligence models are negligible compared to things like heavy industry. I wonder if they also measured how much emissions are produced by playing video games or maintaining the whole internet.

Negative Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Copyright (Art Work)

The only issue I see with Artificial Intelligence is copyright. I know that someone used Artificial Intelligence to create a picture and tried to copyright or get a patent on it, as the author is Artificial Intelligence. The patent office refused (good call) and said they had to use the owner’s name for the computer. But that is just for now. What if they sue in court and get it ruled the other way? The copyright rules should be updated to define “author” as “human only.” That’s the solution.

This raises an interesting question about why images became popular in the first place. The entire digital art community consented to this idea of sharing their digital images online. Presumably, we would know that our artwork would be copied by other artists online. It was a community of artists online. Some, like the ones filing the law suit, rose to great prominence in that community. Their professional careers also bloomed with clients around the world who shared this community.

Now we have Artificial Intelligence programs codifying a particular style of imagery originated by the few most successful online artists. How can an Artificial Intelligence program compete with the artists it was trained on? Surely only if the art it now creates is better than that of those artists. 1) Those who purchase Artificial Intelligence art would have to have so little understanding and appreciation of art as to be indifferent to the qualities of each. Or 2) The quality of the artwork these famous online artists created in the first place was of such mediocre value and quality that even an Artificial Intelligence program could recreate it.

Another perspective is that now that Artificial Intelligence has codified these styles of artwork, we can leave the famous artists, their styles, and the Artificial Intelligence to fight (or draw) them out. Maybe they can paint some muscle-bound images of each other with stupid swords looking angry and having a big battle. And all the other artists can get on with exploring other expressions of art.

I feel like the more pertinent question is: are we making systems that are in some way sentient (having an experience, pain, pleasure, etc.) or even conscious (self-aware)?

Because if so, that, to me, is kind of a larger ethical issue to work through than anything you mentioned.

Something doesn’t feel quite right about bringing another sentient, conscious being into existence without its consent, and you can’t really get its consent before it exists, so the best you could do is create it and then give it the option to kill itself if it doesn’t want to be created… but that’s like, so fucked up, lol.

For the same reason, I feel like it’s kind of insane that so many people decide to have kids and think nothing of it, like it’s just some normal and completely unproblematic thing that’s just expected of you, so you do it. But anyway, the main point I’m getting at is: if you create a living being with a sentient experience and conscious awareness, that’s a HUGE fucking responsibility you’re taking on. You should not be doing something like that if the being you’re creating is just going to suffer throughout its whole life, so it’s kind of your job to make sure it’s comfortable, happy, has everything it needs, feels loved if it needs that, etc.

I don’t think a lot of people are thinking very much about our impact on AI—only usually the other way around, about how Artificial Intelligence impacts us or might impact us in the future.

Hopefully, the models and networks we create don’t wind up as selfish and inconsiderate as we are.

Since there are so many computer programmers in the world, the US is wondering if they believe they can control Artificial Intelligence.