As AI becomes ubiquitous in day-to-day life, writer, curator, and educator Anuradha Vikram believes it could be a beneficial tool — and one that can’t exist without humans, at least for now.
“There's nothing you can get out of ChatGPT that wasn’t only put there by a person, but originally created by a person. So we can feed, for example, Bach minuets into the computer, and it can output a song that sounds like it follows the same principles as a Bach minuet. … So there's nothing that the computer is inventing. It's reconfiguring and re-mixing at a pace that far outstrips our own ability to do this, but without human beings, there would be nothing for the dataset to retrieve,” notes Vikram.
A recent issue is the database called Books3, which includes pirated books that were used — without permission — to train generative AI.
Vikram explains, “They have scanned many examples of modern literature, including many texts by our authors who are currently alive in publishing. And so those materials are all under copyright. And these datasets often consist of human beings’ copyrighted artistic creations. … And the way that they're being assembled [does not consider] … the implications … for the people whose [are] materials there.”
She continues, “There's hundreds of thousands of people involved in the AI. They're not consensually involved in the AI, and they don't have control over how they're being involved in the AI. And so our perception that we're being replaced, I think, is not exactly accurate. It's more that we're being manipulated and possibly used.”
Vikram says AI has been developing for about 20 years, and it’s made huge achievements in natural language processing.
“I started to become aware of how AI and automation [were] becoming the new infrastructure for global corporations … shortly after the turn of the millennium. But now I think people are much more aware of this reality than they were 20 or so years ago.”
Ultimately, she advises, “I don’t think we should demonize any creation that’s our own human creation. We are capable of doing great things with these technologies. We’re also capable of doing terrible things with these technologies.”
“There's nothing that the computer is inventing. It's reconfiguring and re-mixing at a pace that far outstrips our own ability to do this. But without human beings, there would be nothing for the dataset to retrieve,” Anuradha Vikram says of AI. Photo by Paul S Pescador.
Vikram is moderating a panel about the uses of AI, both good and bad, in the creative world tonight for Zocalo Public Square.