More arguments against AI... and your own?
*I'd never started a protest before. Part of me kept having doubts, wondering if it's worth speaking out. Then I see complaint after complaint against AI, story after comment after campaign after article by so many different people. There's barely a day that goes by without some negative report in the media: scams, harassment, deception, copyright infringement, AI slop flooding the market, data centre pollution and many other issues.
When I heard about the artists and musicians protest on July 1, it gave me the final 'push' to submit this protest to the Senate that night (the same night of the 'Midwinter Ball' strangely enough) and start promoting this petition at change.org.
This was the protest, at Parliament House: 'Australian creatives call on Parliament to “hold firm”'
They also have an 'AI Open Letter' from 'Australia's creative industries' for people to sign here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WBXGKN7
*Another story that appeared since was Spotlight's excellent report about the pollution of planned data centres in Australia:
'Inside Australia's AI Data Factories'
https://7plus.com.au/7news-spotlight?episode-id=7SPL26-013
*When I sent my protest to the Australian Greens party, they sent me a link to their own protest, which is here:
https://greens.org.au/campaigns/protect-australians-ai
*Also I wrote the whole petition without realising that in addition to the copyright infringement lawsuits in American courts against AI companies (which have now grown to 131 cases), there are also 89 civil law suits involving AI companies.
Reference: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/ai-tort-lawsuit-tracker/
A different page of the same site shows an additional 42 legal cases involving attempts to ban data centres in America.
*So many criticisms of AI from so many people help prove that the original copying of copyrighted content to build AI was not ‘Fair Use.’
The more criticisms, complaints, campaigns - and there have been vast numbers of them!, means the less of a good reason. Fair Use is supposed to have a ‘societally beneficial reason.’ This was explained as the principle of Fair Use by American Law Professor B. Viswanathan, during the U.S. Senate hearing 'Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training':
“Fair Use, for those of you who don’t take my copyright class... is an affirmative defence: ‘Yes, I infringed, but I did it for a good reason.’ A societally beneficial reason.
“Alright, maybe creating a world repository of Generative AI companies is that. But it doesn’t seem to me that it squares with the other things that we think of as Fair Use. What’s well established Fair Use? Education, criticism, commentary, First Amendment purposes, that we consider valuable and necessary, that are done in good faith.
“‘I educate in good faith, I don’t want to have to clear all those copyrights to educate.’
“‘Okay, great, we allow you to do that.’
“That is not what’s going on here. I don’t want to relitigate the cases... but... flooding the market with sub-par works that substitute for the original works; this is not what Fair Use was intended to achieve, or to facilitate.
“And the very fact that these companies are arguing ‘We’re in good faith, we’re doing Fair Use purposes,’ to me, this shouldn’t even be a defence that they’re allowed to raise. But okay, they will raise it and it will be litigated. But, boy, this does not seem coincident with what Fair Use was ever meant to do.” - B. Viswanathan
Reference link:
*Last week a powerful speech 'This Is Threatening Our Democracy' was delivered against AI in the US Senate:
'Bernie Sanders Goes Nuclear On Big Tech's AI Power Grab.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebwffYAVDvY
After watching the above Senator's speech with many problems of AI listed, it is doubtful that AI companies' copying of copyrighted content without permission has an overall benefit to society which it is supposed to have under the claim of Fair Use.
As the law professor further above explained, Fair Use is meant to have this "societally beneficial reason." These problems of AI raised in the Senator's speech don't benefit society. (Data centre pollution, replacing jobs, threatening emotional wellbeing, declining reading and writing skills in children, screen addiction, taking away privacy rights, deep fake imagery causing deception.)
This is more proof that the copying of copyrighted content without permission to build AI was not Fair Use!
*Also last week was the shocking news that AI companies have been destroying rare books to train AI because they know how terrible their AI slop is. The ultimate in hypocrisy! They can't train on AI because it's terrible, so they buy and destroy huge numbers of priceless antique books so that they can build more AI slop, which is also terrible.
"Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." - internal Anthropic planning document. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Reference: 'AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them'
*On a lighter note, I discovered this hilarious parody by Adam Conover, of OpenAI's program Sora, which was so terrible it was discontinued earlier this year:
'Sora Proves the AI Bubble Is Going to Burst So Hard'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Z4cg5Fyu4
QUESTION:
*What's the strongest argument, article or protest you have seen against AI?
There's SO MANY that it's difficult to sort through them, so if you know of a better one than those listed, please provide a link in the protest comments.
Also please comment there if you have any other concerns about Generative AI.
*In this protest I've demanded the release of copyright holders' information from companies with a combined wealth of somewhere around $7 trillion. (Much of which questionably obtained with LLM programs built on pirated copyrighted information, and other copyrighted sources used without their owner's permission.)
*So please consider donating to either this petition or the more than 1,000 petitions against 'artificial intelligence' at change.org
*Or if you want to support me and buy a traditionally written work, I have just released the short book, 'Marsupian Poetry,' which combines animal poems written in my Australian fantasy book series - most of which were written during the 2010s, long before generative programs existed, although not published until 2019-23.
'Marsupian Poetry' is available on amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Marsupian-Poetry-Chris-Fitzgerald/dp/B0H6PVXC86
Thanks,
Chris