"AI is a glorified tape recorder" - Michio Kaku

Just snipping and splicing

As a content creator, I’m inclined to agree with Professor Kaku, because it’s not an incredibly big deal, or a massive leap. Just another step in a process that has been going on for decades. As he put’s it, Chat GPT “takes snippets of what's on the web created by a human, splices them together and passes it off as if it created these things. .. "And people are saying, 'Oh my God, it’s a human, it’s humanlike.'"

The only advancement is that the people behind it have broken down the logic of language and programmed it into the machines with the help of artificial intelligence. Then, as Professor Kaku says, you feed human-created content into the machine and it cuts them apart and splices them together in ways that make linguistic sense because it knows the logic. That’s all it’s doing, and the linguistic logic programmed into it makes the product seem real and original.

Chat GPTs since the 60s

This has been happening since the 60s and the only thing that is new is that the logic is complex enough and the computers have enough processing power, and a big enough pool of source material, to make the outcome seem human.

Hype aside, there is a serious moral problem here for a content creator like myself. These AIs are scraping up our content, splicing it back together and then selling the product in competition with us. Not very good competition, yet, but it will improve.

Welcome to Glorbo

On this note, let’s talk about Glorbo, a feature of the World of Warcraft game where you can meet Quackion – Aspect of the Ducks. A bit of a random departure from AI, except that neither Glorbo nor Quackion exist. They were made up by Members of the /WoW subreddit to trick a generative AI bot into revealing that it was scraping their posts to create news articles. The AI duly fell for the hoax, hook line and sinker and published a series of stories about the non-existent Glorbo and Quackion. The likes of Chat GPT have been accused of many similar lapses of veracity and are infamously prone to lying.

Questions of morals and intellectual property

The ultimate question though is, if these machines are breaking down our writings and restructuring them in ways that appear original, aren’t they just plagerising us? If I do some research or investigation or original thinking, only to have the product copied by an AI and mass-published, will I get the credit and payment for the work, or will the organisation that own the AI?

When someone designs a computer, they own all the intellectual property that computer produces. When someone creates art, they own that art and any copies of it. So what happens in this case?

In the case of Glorbo, the AI owner was making money from the Subredditor’s thinking and investigation. In the case of ChatGPT and other generative AI bots, we’re doing the thinking, but are the owners stealing or not? I’d be interested to hear your views on the matter.