When I watched a video on the affects of AI, it gave me a strange amount of dread. I had previously watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which was dedicated to how our current social medias routinely harvest our information and sell it to the highest bidder. When watching it though, I felt that there was no real conclusion. It stated that this was a problem we needed to solve, but not how to solve it. This documentary did a significantly better job of outlining the issue and just how solvable it is: by not feeding it.
However, it is nearly impossible to avoid feeding AI. They have recently begun to be plugged into the internet at large, so anything you have posted on there is now susceptible. Some websites are currently trying to add code and file lawsuits over what can and cannot be harvested from them, but this will take a very long time.
This turn of events has brought a particular horror to me as a creator. I have been honing my craft as a writer for almost a decade, working on my personal narrative theories and creative skills whenever I possibly could. In January of this year, I decided to take the final step needed to be sure I was up to snuff: I started publishing my work. I chose a nonprofit website that uses all of its funds on upkeep and allows anyone to access what you write, free of charge or hassling emails over your account. Publishing publicly makes it where I can get feedback in real time on what I did well and what I can improve.
However, a week ago an article was published on how Elon Musk's company devoted to AI is now "crawling" through the internet for information. Basically, it takes everything it can find, mostly through the archival website Common Crawl, which has access to any host of websites (Communications Today). It then scans through everything written and takes it without the author's permission to algorithmically come up with its own addition (Communications Today). Without the original creator's consent, their work is being stolen to be given to an AI who claims it as their own. This entirely affects smaller creators who cannot defend their work in court with the expenses, and have no way to prove it as theirs when they are only a drop in the ocean of plagiarism.
The only way to stop this from happening is to restrict who can access your work, which means less feedback and less experience gained. Either your words must be stolen, or invisible to the passerby. This is a lose-lose situation that is ignored in the name of "advancing technologies", forgetting to ask if it is ethical to steal from others when that stealing is by a robot, not an individual person. Unleashing an AI upon something as vast as the internet without warning or forethought can only lead to danger. Without rules in place, this will hurt real people. If it possible, legislation must be made to ensure the creative ownership of the individual is maintained.
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