It is magic. One has only to ask, it appears in the moment. Draw me a sheep, but an orange sheep flying in the New York sky of the 1930s and in the style of Salvador Dali. Poof, it appears. Write me a poem about Pierre Poilievre, as if the author were Edmond Rostand. The alexandrines thread themselves before your eyes. Give me a 900-word chronicle on the catholic-secularism of François Legault by borrowing the writing tics of Jean-François Lisée.
Wow! A moment ! Is he about to steal my job, this one? It only took a few weeks between the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) online and its summons before the judges. “Plagiarists”, “collage machines” are strong words used by litigants to vilify the clusters of algorithms whose impact on artistic or journalistic life can become devastating for creators.
AI “is a parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists now and in the future,” Matthew Butterick, one of the attorneys for three California artists suing the company, told CBS News. Stability AI. This software is used by 10 million people every day. Its competitors DreamUp and Dall-E 2 essentially offer the same technology and service.
” Everything’s good “
Are the images and texts created by the AI original creations? The owners of these robots obviously say that is the case. “Can a person look at someone else’s photo and learn from it and make a similar image? pleads David Holz, CEO of Midjourney, in an interview with the Associated Press. “Insofar as AIs learn like people, it’s kind of the same, and if the images come out differently, then it looks like it’s fine. »
Yes, it’s exactly the same as drawing inspiration from a human, but only if you think your calculator is genius every time it pulls out a cube root. There is, in fact, no intelligence in the probabilistic system that coldly deduces from its stock of data the form that is statistically closest to what you asked for. Without data to copy and rearrange, nothing would come of it. The entire AI industry is dying of blank page syndrome. Only humans — and not all of them — succeed, certainly from their personal experience, in inventing something new.
In short, the AI can only regurgitate what it has consumed. But who owns this data? They are either in the public domain, the use of which is authorized by all, or private sites protected by copyright, which the masters of online instruments seem to have decided to ignore.
According to the analysis of the expert in these matters Andy Baio, Stability AI fed its robot with gigatons of images gleaned from all directions, including in private banks, in particular from the very touchy Getty Images. Getty unsheathed his London lawyers to claim his due. Baio found images from Vanity Fair and the Disney company — also very strict on copyright. He also noted that were plundered the sites of artists still alive whose works are now used as a point of reference for the spontaneous generation of infinite derivatives. No, they were neither consulted nor remunerated.
The “ability of AI to flood the market with a virtually unlimited number of images [similaires] will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists,” says lawyer Butterick. What is true for the image is obviously true for the text.
Not only. I have in mind a comic strip published in 1974, bitumen eaters. In this crazy extrapolation of car society, all humans live in self-driving vans while robots took care of everything. The satellites retransmit films, information and series produced by computers recombining images and previous scenarios. The author Jacques Lob (also creator of the Snowpiercer of origin) and the cartoonist José Bielsa were not only cartoonists, but prophets. And if it becomes possible to soon have a Netflix series spit out by an AI, when will a synthetic version of Politics buffs ? Understand my excitement.
The impossible break
There is therefore every reason to declare a pause in the development of AI, as requested at the end of March by a group of thinkers, including Yoshua Bengio. A break which, obviously, will never take place, the race for billions being engaged between the giants of Big Tech. The best example is Google, whose director of ethics oversight, Timnit Gebru, lost her job precisely for advising caution.
Even if it were theoretically possible, in some democracies, to impose a halt to the posting of this software, China, Russia, or Western societies through digital havens, could not be held back. Judges must urgently clarify the issue of copyright to prevent the digital plunder of creators.
Lawmakers must do the same. The legal framework has never been able to precede technological dangers, but if the G7, the G20 and the OECD are of any use, it should be the development of urgent common rules on these issues, knowing that the rogue states will act , whatever we do, as thugs.
It’s clear, the AI companies are trying to force the game by using the Uber method: we rush into the china store, too bad for the modelers, polishers, turners and other moulders, who will manage with the pieces and glue. On behalf of all authors and creators — and especially political commentators — let’s say no to the uberization of copyright.
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