#feeding chatgpt fanfics or feeding AIs people's faces and voices is terrible

[menagerie-of-monsters]

For the record:

I do not use nor condone the use of AI-generated images

I do not use nor condone the use of AI-generated text

I do not use nor condone the use of AI-generated voice acting

I have yet to find ANY generative AI that is trained on an ETHICAL dataset. You cannot have an ethical generative AI that is trained on scraped images, scraped text, or scraped voices. Period, end of story.

Stealing people's words and artwork is horrifying enough. Stealing their faces and voices is beyond reprehensible.

listen I say this with patience bc some people may genuinely have not thought about this before but if you firmly say “AI art is terribly unethical and steals from artists” (which is correct) but then turn around and use voice AIs to generate songs/voice lines that sound like your favourite voice actors or singers……………………………………that is also AI art and it is also terribly unethical

[thehubby]

Apparently this confused a few people, so perhaps I should clarify. This is one of those trains of thought which seems obvious in your head but on paper, not so much.

About five years ago, a chapter of Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash was published by Botnik Studios. The title is of a nonexistent book, and this segment (Chapter 13, "The Handsome One") was written by then-nascent AI using "predictive text" behavior which was quite the rage at the time.

The short generated story is filled with nonsensical ramblings resulting in unintentional off-the-wall humor. Ron devours Hermione's family after doing a frenzied tap dance. Hermione opens a locked door with the password of "Beef Women." Harry tears his own eyes out and throws them into a forest.

For a brief moment, this story was a hit in pop culture circles. The highlight of the story appeared to be this line:

The tall Death Eater was wearing a shirt that said 'Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance' so Hermione dipped his face in mud.

This led to digital memes as well as physical memorabilia such as t-shirts bearing the phrase.

The point of my original statement is that, at the time, few people if any gave much thought to Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash or other, less popular works of predictive text. It was all a laugh, a silly little computer trying to be creative and showing us all how terrible it was at doing so.

Fast-forward five years and we have ChatGPT and similar software which can write term papers and legal briefs (albeit questionably) and can finish fanfics if you feed them source material. We have Midjourney and StableDiffusion churning out visual art. Systems are being tested to synthesize voices seamlessly using just seconds of audio samples. While these could ultimately be quite useful tools for humanity, they do currently represent a significant threat to the livelihoods and cultural contributions of millions of artists and technical experts.

Let's not make the same mistake that we made in 2018 by assuming that just because ChatGPT makes some mistakes like lying about its sources, or that some art generators struggle with perspective, that these are silly things of idle amusement and not worthy of consideration. These things are important and we should give serious thought to how they are going to affect our future, how they should be used, and whether they should be regulated, supported, or suppressed. I don't have the answers to these questions, but as a people we should be giving some thought in order to come up with those answers.

We all laughed when Hermione forgot how to dance. If only we had known.