GenAI vs Human Inspiration

Generative AI number crunching is not the same thing as human inspiration.

So, there’s a debate going on right now in the film industry. And I think it’s mostly in good faith.

It’s a complicated question. Here’s what we agree on.

We all agree that if a gen AI model generates... Darth Vader, say, and the AI company doesn’t have the rights to Darth Vader, well, that’s a violation of copyright and that’s good old-fashioned plagiarism and that should be against the rules. We all agree on that.

The question that’s being debated doesn’t have to do with those outputs. It has to do with the inputs.

In other words, the way these models are built, they don’t generate anything on their own.

What happens is AI companies take every book ever written, every article on the internet, every song that’s ever come out, every movie ever made, every video on YouTube, everything. And they feed it into this algorithm and it breaks it up into data, tokens, calculates the statistical relationship between the different tokens and it can generate these outputs because of the human inputs.

And the debate is, should they be able, these AI companies, should they be able to take all that content and data? without getting permission and without offering compensation.

And the argument that I personally don’t agree with, but the argument goes, well, when an author writes a book, that author has read many books.

And you wouldn’t expect an author who wrote a book to pay all the other authors of all the books that they’ve ever read.

And an AI model, well, it does the same thing. It takes inspiration from all this trading data and it creates something new.

But, there are a number of problems with this argument. For one thing, an AI is not a human. You’re going to see this a lot in the coming years. AI companies asking for their models that pose as humans, that sort of pretend to be humans, that imitate humans, to be given equal treatment under the law. as humans.

This is only one example. There’s other examples where a chatbot that convinces a teenager to commit suicide is being asked for protection under the First Amendment, as if the AI model has the right to the freedom of speech.

Leaving the philosophy aside, there are other important reasons why this AI number crunching is different than human inspiration.

No human being could ingest every book ever written in a matter of weeks. It’s not what we do. We take inspiration from very specific things.

And, how about this? A human being that’s writing a book or making a movie or making anything, sure, they’re drawing from influences from various other works, but what they’re mostly drawing from is their life experience, their humanity, their unique perspective as a unique human being. There’s only one of them. There’s only one of you. There’s only one of me. That human uniqueness offers a unique perspective and a unique creativity. And that is what we’re trying to protect, because that’s what makes civilization go.

That’s what makes life worthwhile. And if we give that up, if we say, no, that kind of human perspective, that unique creativity that every single individual has, that has no economic value. We’re going to end up living in a world where any original thinker, any new idea, any great piece of work can be sucked up by an AI company, put into their AI model and monetized without paying the person.

This is about more than art and creativity and entertainment. This is about just how an economy ought to work because this technology is not just coming for my industry. It’s coming for everybody’s industry. It’s coming for your job too.

And, if we go down this path of least resistance, where AI companies are allowed to just take anything that anybody’s ever done and make money with it without paying people what kind of economy are we gonna have?

I’ll tell you what kind it’ll be a feudal economy feudalism where we used to have kings and serfs kings owned everything, and everyone else owned nothing. That’s where we’ll be headed.

So, what we need to do now is all stand together for this basic principle that people have a right to be paid for their good work in the digital world. We need to demand new systems that provide ongoing structures of compensation, consent, controls, transparency. We should not settle for one-time buyouts. We should not be forgiving past theft. We all need to stand together and make sure that we build ourselves these new systems that can make for a healthy economy moving forward.

This isn’t against AI. This is actually envisioning how AI can be good for everybody.

So as to this debate in our little movie industry, should we just sue them when they output Batman and Superman? Or should we sue them because they took everything? Should we make new laws? Should we upgrade our systems?

Can we make ourselves a future where human ingenuity is still economically rewarded? And maybe can the movie industry lead the way for other industries?

Because again, like, this isn’t just about me. Frankly, I’ve done all right, but I am worried about the future. I’m worried about my kids. I’m worried about everybody else.

This is a lot of what we’ve been talking about with the Creators Coalition on AI. Not just, you know, actors and filmmakers and not even just musicians and visual artists, but yeah, also journalists and academics and, hey, scientists, engineers, architects, designers. I mean, really just everybody who’s making things for a living. We all need to stand up together in unison for this principle and advocate for the building of new, better systems that can make this incredible new technology work for everyone’s benefit instead of just concentrating power and money into the hands of a few gigantic AI companies.

I think that unity is really important. I also think it’s powerful. So that’s why I’m here talking about it. Let’s continue the conversation. Thanks.

Watch Full Video Here.