[Artwork: A Young Lady Playing the Harp | James Northcote (1746-1841) | Found on ArtUK.org]

As the technology of the world continues to grow, the debate of how much we should let this technology influence our worlds persists. Today, as artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, MetaAI, etc. continue to develop, artists, writers, voice actors, and more face the issue of their skills and effort being taken without their consent to train AI models intended to replace them. We often overlook the implicit power in these creators' work in our everyday lives: the music we listen to, the posters and advertisement lining streets of our cities, the photographs and videos captured and added to almost every piece of media we see online, the movies we watch with our friends and family, the books we eagerly turn the pages of (or scroll through, if you're more of an e-book person), or the voiceovers of the silly cartoons you notice kids these days watch. The creators in this world and their work fill in the gaps of our every-day life, but they are often taken for granted.

AI is a powerful tool, and we know of its significance in the world. However, the way in which these AI models, the future of our societies, are being developed is simply unethical. Yes, it's a great achievement that AI has made it to where it is today, but it's at the expense of human creators that it has succeeded. No, it's technically not "plagiarism," but at best it can be classified as pseudo-creative. Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most well known pieces to this day, but if some of his most well-known works such as The Last Supper were taken and fed into an AI model to train it to replace daVinci's art, including his style and expertise of each brushstroke and the nuances behind his composition, and then the AI outputted images that resembled daVinci's work very closely, would it be right to consider these generated images as original? This kind of pseudo-creation is what AI models today do with creators' work. There is no citation page or credit given where it is due, and we, as a society thus far, have accepted it without a second thought. As AI continues to generate pseudo-creations, more and more creators risk being replaced by it. The human touch in every-day life's experiences, the goosebumps we get hearing that one part of that one song we listen to, the emotional investment we put into the plots of stories we read, the artistry that touches our very souls every once in a while, will be lost to artificially generated creations.

We must renew the roots before the whole plant grows rotten. AI is a wonderful creation with an inexplicable amount of potential for the future; however, the more we sit around and leave it to develop without regulation, the more dangerous it becomes for not only creators' passions and careers, but for everyone's perception of life itself. There are three things we must do to ensure the protection of human creativity and the ethical flourishing of AI:

1. RESTRICT the resources that companies currently have to train their AI models. Pass legislation requiring creators' consent to use their work to train AI models.
2. REGULATE the growth of AI. We must ensure that AI will not, in any point of the future, harm humans to any extent. Harsher legal punishments should be set for the unconsented use of creators' work in the training of AI.
3. RESPECT the work of creators and their skills as well as the growth of AI. They are both significant to our and the future generations' lives, and we must find a way for both to coexist without obstructing each other. This will not be easy, but we must not rashly tear down either AI or human creators' work. We as a society must find the nuances to complete this ever-growing balance we search for between technology and humanity.