AI and Ethics

Yep, I have an opinion too.

AI is here, and now we have to figure out what we’re going to do with and about it. Like so many leaps in technology, it has far outstripped regulations on it, and society is having to come to grips with its presence. I’ve witnessed several such leaps in my lifetime between the birth of the internet, social media, AI… Technology going charging ahead while the rest of us try to figure out what the hell this means for us is not a new thing for my generation.

As such, for better or worse, I’m used to world-changing technologies emerging every few years or so and watching people talk about how it’s the end of the world and the end of civilization as we know it. While I’m jaded enough to be quite sick of the anxious chicken flapping that is the way the world responds to such things, I am not so foolish as to ignore the obvious pitfalls and downsides of AI.

In fact, it seems like right now AI developers are intent on replacing the arts with AI and leaving humans to do the awful everyday tasks for low wages while outsourcing creativity to machines because it’s more financially viable for companies to make money from. And if that sounds cynical and angry, that’s because it is. There’s even talk of artists and writers like we are somehow “gatekeeping” art by refusing to accept works generated by AI as art. They’re images, certainly. They’re even pretty ones. But I will not for a second call them actual art. Art requires the spark of humanity. And that spark is more than just learning how to write AI text.

Fight me.

With all that growling out of the way, I absolutely believe there is room for ethical use of AI-generated images and text. I actually have grown to rely on ChatGPT for some small things that I find it does better than I do. I use it to help me tighten up marketing copy, for example, by running it through a few times to reword something I had already written in order to see what ChatGPT comes up with. Then, if I see something I like, I rework that into something that I then use. That process takes less time than writing something and walking away for a week before I come back to it and decide I hate it.

I have no issues doing that with things like YouTube descriptions, book blurbs, Amazon ad text, and so on. I’m not avoiding doing the writing myself entirely, and that kind of writing isn’t particularly creative. I feel similarly about people using AI image generators to create token images for D&D campaign NPCs.

I know there are art packs with such things out there. I have a Patreon subscription to one of them and get their art frequently (shout out to Forgotten Adventures). But a lot of folks have no money these days, and using AI images for purely personal purposes doesn’t strike me as unethical on its face.

Before you arch your backs and hiss, I know AI image generators are unethically trained in the current time. I’m talking about how to use AI ethically in concept, not the fact that the current models are a problem. They are. I’m not going to pretend they’re not. Some are shifting gears to train their AI only on artists who have agreed to such terms and/or art that the owner owns the copyright to. Like the Adobe stock generator that is in the works.

I am not a fan of Adobe on principle, but they are doing the right thing (so far as I know; if I’m wrong, please tell me) on this particular subject. My feelings about subscription software are another entire conversation that involves yelling, cussing, and throwing things.

What about copyright?

The current US legal understanding states that things created by non-humans cannot have copyright applied to them. So nothing created by these AI generators is safe from being copied, even word-for-word. They are, essentially, public domain. Certainly, some of these AI image creators attempt to slap copyrights onto them and claim that they own the images somehow, but they absolutely do not, according to current US legal precedent. If you want to know more about that, do a search for Naruto vs. Slater et al.

Since AI-generated content cannot, at present, be copyrighted, that means that any books, book covers, or images created purely using its engines are, by their nature, open season. So anyone writing a “novel” using exclusively AI? Well, they had best be prepared for someone to copy it word for word and re-publish it under their own name with a slightly different cover. The same is said of images. It is open season.

You can see how this is going to become a problem. Book publishers swiftly disallowed AI-generated books because if the books they publish are public domain, they are not going to be able to stop others from using that intellectual property, thereby stripping them of the ability to sell books nobody else has. AI text is also garbage for anything beyond inspiration, idea generation, some grammar and punctuation help, rephrasing, and using it as a sounding board. Having read purely AI-generated stories before, they fall apart fast and need a great deal of human involvement in order to be readable, let alone good. I don’t believe we are at risk of AI replacing humans in that way anytime soon, if ever.

“Artifical Intelligence” generated by Substack

So how would we use it?

The idea here is that AI-generated content can be ethical. AI-generated images, for example, can be used in articles like this one to illustrate points and catch the eye. I’m not selling anything in particular, and I’m not attempting to do anything with the image other than illustrate a post I am not going to make money on.

And no, that’s not salty. I give my blog content away for free for a reason. The stuff behind my paywall is just there as a “thank you” for folks who want to support me.

Rather than replacing creatives wholesale, I think AI is going to fit comfortably into certain spaces, like helping me refine my marketing copy. That isn’t taking someone’s job away from them as I would not have hired anyone to do it in the first place. All it does is help me do my own work faster and more efficiently. I am still doing the parts of it that matter to me, after all. This article? Not written by AI.

I don’t believe that ChatGPT is ever going to write books of any quality. It might be able to produce a short essay, someday, but I question whether it will ever be equal to the task. It is wholly unable to fact check anything or even answer a question without making things up. I know. I spent a lot of time giggling at the AI-generated profiles of myself that it wrote when I asked it to create one. It made my life sound a lot more interesting than it is, that’s for certain.

Well, okay, maybe not. It didn’t mention the swordplay, historical reenactment, D&D, video games, or any of the other things I do when I’m not putting words on the screen.

I don’t think it will ever be able to produce entirely factual content that can be relied upon, either. The closest it can do is spit out the equivalent of the first search result on Google and then embellish on that point because it doesn’t know. And of course it doesn’t know. Any more than Google does.

So what would we do with AI if not that? Use it to make our work flow faster. Use it to help coders debug their code more efficiently. Create throwaway images for articles (like the one I’ve used in this one). AI’s role in the world is not going to be replacing creatives. Or at least it shouldn’t be, anyway. Sure, companies might try, but in the long run it will prove a fruitless venture in most applications because the technology is never going to be able to accomplish what humans can in the creative sense. The best it can do is make interesting collages out of images it has poached from elsewhere.

Again, before anybody starts crowing about how humans copy other humans’ art, I kindly invite you to shut up. While I certainly can copy art and styles of other artists to learn, the difference is that I have a soul, and from that soul I produce unique elements that other artists do not have. Writing is the same way. An AI could attempt to mimic my “voice,” but it would never quite capture it. Just like a ghostwriter cannot quite capture the voice of another author. They can get damned close a lot of the time, if they’re good, but it’s sort of like method acting in a way. You have to be in that writer’s head so deeply that you lose who you are. Because that’s the magic of it. Who you are, your experiences, your perspective, your value, your thoughts… That is where voice comes from. That is where art comes from. And that is the unique human element AI cannot replace.

I also know writers who use AI as their co-pilot in the sense that they will plug in passages they want to reword because their brains are just not doing the job. Or they’ll use it to help them build a plot or even edit text and show them grammar and punctuation mistakes. I know one in particular who views it as an accessibility tool when his brain is just not working. And I get that. I’m not going to tell him he’s writing his books wrong because, while he’s using AI to help him get his words down, he’s not replacing his own creativity with the AI’s. Not even close. He’s just augmenting it and trying to work within ways to accommodate a disability.

How do you think you might use AI to help you manage things to free you up for more important or creative works?

In conclusion…

How we use this technology is going to be up in the air for a while. It’s going to take time to figure out what this means for everybody. Just like how we’re still figuring out social media, despite having come a long way from MySpace. I miss that site. The days before algorithms dictated my news feed. And when we fought over who was in our top seven friends.

Things are going to be rocky for a while. New technologies and ideas always have that effect for a time when we encounter them. And this is definitely a bigger hill to climb than some others. Particularly since companies are eyeing this one hungrily as a way to force artists out so they don’t have to pay them.

That said? I have faith that this will shake out, and human creativity is not going to be lost in the long term. Creatives are of vital importance to what it means to be human. To the principles thereof. You cannot remove the creative, spiritual element from art. And writing AI prompts is not art. Writing AI prompts is the image equivalent of knowing how to tailor your Google searches by using their exclusion and inclusion tactics and getting specific search results through that method.

Is that useful? Sure. Using the tips I know to get specific search results absolutely is helpful to me, and I use it often. But using those tricks doesn’t mean I’ve created anything. All I’ve done is more efficiently located the specific thing I’m looking for. The act of creation is more than that. Art is more than that.

Art also doesn’t need to be good to be valuable. Bad art has value. There’s a reason parents put their kids’ hand turkeys on the fridge. AI images might be pretty or inspiring, and I won’t argue that. But they definitely aren’t art.

The thing that really scares me

To leave this article on a somber note, I want to address the thing that really has me sweating about AI. It’s not the idea of replacing creatives. It’s the way it can be used to create deep fakes, falsify images, and create very authentic-sounding articles that are entirely false. Tools to identify AI-generated images are going to need to grow and grow fast because it is leaving us vulnerable to terrible disinformation campaigns.

It also could have darker purposes, like faking inappropriate images of people to try and blackmail them. Or worse. Such things can already be created with photo manipulation, but doing such a thing believably requires a certain degree of skill as well as a fair bit of time. AI image generators will allow for mass-production of images that can fool the casual viewer with very little effort. Even I’ve been bamboozled by AI images on a few occasions. Granted, the ones that got me were of inanimate objects and an image of an owl where I didn’t think to count the toes first.

That is where my concerns really lie. Replacing creatives is not the thing that keeps me awake at night. It’s the concern over how much AI images, deep fakes, AI voiceovers, and so on could be used to strip away people’s ability to discern truth from fiction in the most horrible way we have ever seen.

And if that doesn’t scare you, I don’t think you’re paying attention.