It has taken me a bit of time to think this one through as I’ve rewritten it after my original draft led my thinking in a different direction. The core of my thoughts still remain the same, but I’m still deciding if this will be a detriment for society.
Thus, I will lay it out here and let time figure it out.
There should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of Silicon Valley that AI generative models are built on mining (stealing) the data (or work) of everyone else. After all, this is the same place where Apple stole from Xerox, Microsoft stole from Apple and everyone else just followed suit at stealing from each other.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
This is just as true for the tech industry as it is for the magic world I spoke about in the previous post. However, at some point, you can only steal so much before it’s time to innovate. The major corporations make it their business to buy up startups (which is a business model in itself) instead of doing anything creative on their own.
The only other step is corporate espionage, which is a sore spot for me as a Canadian considering what happened to our major tech company and biology lab.
Which leaves us with the question of what our world values more: creative thinking or strategic domination.
The problem with the latter is we’ve equated it with the former. Originally, these trio of posts were about the death of imagination thanks to the advent of generative AI models. While it’s overly simplistic to attack the latest piece of technology as the end of humanity, I think it’s fair to say we now have a piece of technology that seems to be the natural end of what we value as a society.
Why bother putting any cognitive load on the brain when you have a piece of technology that will steal ideas from everyone?
Before someone accuses me of being a tech alarmist, I understand we’re not all trying to be creative artists or innovative thinkers. For menial tasks that need to get done, advances in technology have always been a help and I’m sure some would argue that we can make even greater leaps thanks to freeing up our cognitive load. In fact, we can argue that we can now put things together in ways we’ve never been able to before.
But if this is where we’re heading, is there any intrinsic value to “thinking outside the box?” If all the innovative thinking that we do is just an amalgamation of ideas by others, why bother encouraging creative thought? Perhaps, this is actually what it means to be creative.
But, does this bring us down a slippery slope where we hit a stagnation of human thought and hand over our future to our own inventions?
Or will there be a backlash against this technological determinism we’re heading towards?
At the moment, from my standpoint, the world belongs to thieves. I just can’t figure out if it’s always been that way, or always will be.