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AI Panel
From left, US Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, founder and co-chair of the Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus; writer and producer George R.R. Martin; and University of New Mexico Professor and Santa Fe Institute External Faculty Member Melanie Moses met at the Violet Crown for a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence.
In advance of an Oct. 14 “fireside chat” spearheaded by US Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, on Artificial Intelligence and the creative economy, this writer—who moderated the chat—asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT (the free version) to characterize some of the threats it posed to the creative economy. It responded quickly and with detail: “One of the potential threats that some experts have highlighted is the concern that AI like ChatGPT might reduce the demand for human-generated creative content,” ChatGPT said, before enumerating additional threats related to copyright, job displacement and quality control.
Heinrich and fellow panelists writer George RR Martin and University of New Mexico Computer Science Professor Melanie Moses, an external faculty member at Santa Fe Institute, iterated similar concerns.
Heinrich founded Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus in 2019 and then helped create the National AI Research Resource Task Force and the The CREATE AI Act.
“The biggest threat would be if we allow artificial intelligence to become a tool that supplants artists that rather than a tool that is used by creative artists,” Heinrich noted.
Martin is among 17 writers who have joined a proposed class-action lawsuit over ChatGPT, filed by the New York-based Authors Guild, which accuses OpenAI’s program of “flagrant and harmful” copyright infringement. The suit, he noted, focuses on the lack of compensation from AI models such as ChatGPT for the published work it uses to feed its language models.
“All of these things are being fed…everything I ever wrote since 1971 has probably been fed into chat at this point, and everything that Stephen King ever wrote, and everything that Shakespeare wrote, and this is what feeds them,” he noted.
Moses noted that in addition to the potential job losses creatives might face, an even larger threat exists: “We as humanity are threatened in losing the creative contributions of humanity,” she said. “I think that’s a very scary position to be in.”
