AI can only ever be built on theft

So-called “generative” Artificial Intelligence is in fact “regurgitative” in nature.

 

The long and the short of it is:

"AI" takes in a dataset of human-made media as input. Everything that it makes is a regurgitation of patterns that it locates within this input.

It cannot create anything beyond a bored and uninspired recomposition of elements sourced from its input data. Anything it creates that is of worth has necessarily been extracted from original human creators. 

Injury is added to insult when AI-generated media that has been trained on a person's work is then entered into the same marketplace that the person has been selling their work. This is the case within every sector that AI has touched:

This is inherently, unavoidably the case with AI: any value that it creates will only exist in the context of the human source material. 

 

"Within-Sector" AI

We may talk about this as "within-sector" AI use. To take the Etsy example, "within-sector" AI would consist of a generative AI model that has been trained specifically on a dataset of Etsy products. It need not have been trained solely on this dataset, but the conceptual key is that it has been trained on a dataset within the sector that it will then be utilised. For instance, an AI trained on journalism that is put to use within the sector of journalism can be said to be a "within-sector" AI. 

This can be compared to the lazy neighbour in a school exam leaning over and copying verbatim what you have written. More closely, it can be compared to a classmate studying everyone's answers and their corresponding scores after the test and then writing their answers. Of course they are a media sensation when they score among the best: they cheated! It is not a fair test, and all of the value that this cheater offers has been lazily vacuumed up from the best efforts of actual humans.

The irony is that whatever the quality of efforts the humans provide within their answers, so long as they are linked to a ranking they are of worth to the machine: it can learn from the bad pupils what not to do. In real life, the "ranking" may not be a grade or a mark, but can be anything equivalent: the number of views or hits a webpage has received, the number of likes on a comment or post, or simply the fact that the person has continued to create more content (which indicates that they have been able to establish a successful enterprise via their early efforts).

 

"Cross-Sector" AI 

In contrast to "within-sector" use of AI, a proponent may claim that the real value AI delivers is when it crosses from one sector to another, offering ideas that are novel to that second sector. However, the "intelligence" gained from learned patterns is rarely if ever appropriately transferrable to a separate domain, generally speaking. This is also before any discussion of the actual utility and efficiency afforded by the employment of a hallucination-prone machine that is inherently hackable.

The more present reality of cross-sector AI usage exists in the miscellaneous uses of generalist AI engines to fill up sectors with near-valueless content. Image generation bots like DALL-E are employed to churn out media that is thrown onto tote bags and t-shirts via print-on-demand vendors like Printify, and this content is then piped into Etsy and online marketplaces. In addition, "cross-sector" bots such as ChatGPT may be used to mass-generate prompts for the image generation step.

In fact, Printify it has thoroughly embraced the AI product-generation paradigm. Printify's product-customisation studio webapp now has an AI image generator built into it. Not only this, there is a button the user can push that generates random prompts for the image generator. As if that were not enough, there is another button by which the user can automagically "Enhance Prompt". This means that Printify's developers have hooked up an instance of an image-generation AI, a prompt generator AI, and a prompt enhancer AI. Given the "generalisation" developments that have been made to pack all of AI's possible features into one engine, these functionalities may have come packed into a single "AI" engine. Still, the level to which Printify has gone out of its way to remove any barriers from users who want to put shitty AI content onto t-shirts is remarkable in itself. Each user account is given 15 free uses of this AI image-generation utility per day. Printify is massively culpable in the Etsy crisis. (We do not use Printify; we only source print-on-demand content from Inkthreadable, a store with an emphasis on eco-friendly goods with plastic-free packaging. Incidentally, we ruled out Printify before seeing their implementation of AI: their stock of organic products was not as comprehensive as we required.)