Following the publication of an open letter from world luminaries calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, The duty wondered about possible solutions to put AI at the service of the common good. This is a recurring concern.
The use of conversational robots such as ChatGPT and Bard is spreading like wildfire in all spheres of human activity, an irreversible phenomenon, like the proverbial genie emerging from the lamp. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made a hard but fair observation that AI will have an impact comparable to the invention of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the smart phone. . We are experiencing a paradigm shift, which the media are documenting in real time.
The media, precisely. They are among the industries that will be challenged by advances in AI. For the time being, robots are outspoken liars and untrustworthy mythomaniacs to write informational text. There Columbia Journalism Review made a review of the mistakes, which even go as far as the invention of a sex scandal targeting a professor of law at the University of Washington and a prison sentence for an Australian politician.
For Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center on Digital Journalism at Columbia University, chatbots will act as an accelerant on the global blaze of disinformation. They will exploit one of the universal flaws of the human species: its credulity and its propensity to believe in invented narrative rituals.
The main threat is not what we imagine. It is not so much the replacement of the human intelligence of journalists by AI that we must fear as the annihilation of the right to intellectual property. Our guest columnist Jean-François Lisée used a simple and powerful formula that summarizes the question. We are witnessing the “uberization of copyright”.
Conversational robots have fed themselves somewhere to be able to declaim the extent of their knowledge in a matter of seconds. They scoured news sites and other platforms for automated mass data collection, violating the platforms’ terms of use. The media are not the only ones to have been robbed. Photobanks, government sites, scholarly journals and other sites not protected against mass collection have certainly fueled chatbots.
In the United States, publishers are wondering about the best strategy to adopt to obtain royalties. Some firms, including Microsoft and Google, have shown themselves to be open to possible solutions aimed at allowing publishers to benefit from the appropriation of their content by conversational robots. This is the topic of the hour.
In Canada, it’s radio silence. The federal government, anxious to preserve the ecosystem of news in all its diversity, and concerned about misinformation, must not remain wait-and-see. AI is barely emerging when two players saturate the market: Microsoft and Google. If Canada lets publishers beg piecemeal, the inequity of the power relationship between them and the AI giants, as well as the inadequacy of the Copyright Act in the face of AI, will predetermine the outcome of the talks.
As part of the study of Bill C-27, relating to the regulation of AI, Ottawa must seize the opportunity and strengthen the protection granted to copyright in the age of AI. We need a legislative rampart to supervise these robots programmed to take everything, without giving anything in return to content creators. At stake is the ability of media, and all artists, to enforce their intellectual property and earn a living in the next cycle of digital transformation.