Quirkworthy

Prompts = delegation, nothing more. 

Getting a professional to fix my pipes does not make me a plumber. In a similar way, writing a prompt does not make me an artist. Or an author. Or a coder. Or anything other than someone who understands how to ask for what they’d like. This is a skill that we learn as small children, and while it can always be refined to fit a particular circumstance better, it’s hardly a major achievement. 

So, when I read folk claiming to be an artist because they wrote a prompt for Midjourney or Nano Banana, then I’m reminded of the concept of stolen valour. You’re not an artist, you’re someone who asked nicely.  

Now, it’s a different situation if you are an actual artist and you’re using the AI generated output as one part in your process and it’s going to get modified using your actual skill at art. In that use case, AI generated output is most similar to the raw material of photobashing, and is a process I expect is already widespread in professional concepting. It’s a tool. Artists use tools. They just don’t expect the paintbrush to do the whole picture without any more input than being asked to do so. 

Delegating your work is something we do all the time. However, when we hear or experience managers claiming the delegated work as their own then we all find that wrong. Same here. Delegated work isn’t your work. 

And, if you’re just flaunting the unmodified AI output as your own, as I’ve seen done repeatedly, then you are, at the absolute best, masquerading as an untrained art director. Most likely you’re just deluding yourself and lying to everyone else. 

Do better. 

Speaking of doing better, the other thing that delegating to AI does is atrophy any skills you did have. It’s obvious, and nothing to do with AI per se. Just like anything else, if you delegate the work to someone else, then the someone else is the one who learns and upskills themselves. Not you. 

Learning any skill takes time, effort, and lots of practice. Delegating is not a short cut, regardless of whether it’s to AI or a human. You don’t gain the skill. If anything, your existing skills degrade from lack of use. 

So, if you want to learn, you need to do. For yourself. The hard way. 

I was going to talk about why I’ve found the whole, often worrying, AI thing good in at least one important aspect. However, while writing that article, I realised that I needed this one as a foundation. That’s been the case with this whole bundle of AI topics; there are so many things I want to discuss at once. Anyway, AI and legal stuff now.

First, I should say that I’m using art as an example because it seems clear and there’s more info on court cases and so on. The same principles seem to apply to all AI-generated work though. Also, I need to say that I’m not a lawyer, so this is only my layman’s view of things. It’s based on personal experience helping a legal team with copyright cases, some digging into other company’s experiences and published concerns, plus reading about AI-related lawsuits. I’m sure I’ve missed something, so please feel free to enlighten me in the comments. 

Morals? What Morals?

If you’re a big company, then ignoring the whole illegal use of training data question (discussed previously) may be convenient in the short term. Several are doing just this. I think they’re right that the public is fickle and will soon move on. However, I also wonder whether their tacit bet that their reputation will weather the storm sufficiently intact will pan out. 

Even so, I don’t think this is the worst of AI’s copyright problems. We’ll come back to what is in a minute.

Don’t Share Your Secrets with Mr MechaHitler

In my reading, I’ve come across some companies doing their due diligence and testing out the various AI software before they jump in with both feet. This is great information to mine for you and me because we don’t individually have the resources to do as thorough a job of this. It’s also notable because there seems to be a pattern. 

Whatever they think of the creative abilities of AI, and however simple that is or isn’t to include in their pipelines, they’ve got legal questions. Any AI work that includes talking to a cloud (most of them) means that your proprietary info is going into the training pool. Read the small print. Research has shown that this information is indeed recoverable to a high 90s percentage accuracy. Legal departments get very squirrely about this sort of thing, never mind the GDPR implications of data management if there’s any customer info included. 

This uncertainty in data control and management potentially puts the company in a host of trouble. Firstly, there’s the potential loss of company secrets, which is a problem commercially and for encouraging investors. Then there’s the issues with personal data. Putting this at the mercy of AI training pools is potentially illegal in itself, though I’ve never heard of it being tested in court. It’s also a very bad look in the court of public opinion when it inevitably gets out. 

For these reasons, some companies are being stopped from AI use by their legal departments alone. I don’t have a legal department. However, if it’s a legal problem for them, I don’t see why I’d be immune. So that’s one reason not to use AI. This isn’t my main concern though. I’m sure this will be cleared up in a year or two as this kind of client is way too important for the AI businesses to be pushing away. If I wanted to use AI and this was the only issue, then I’d just wait it out. 

A Human Wearing a Robot Suit

Possibly the biggest legal challenge for AI companies, going forward, is the fact that most versions of copyright laws clearly say that only human-generated product can be the subject of copyright. Simply put, you cannot copyright the output of an AI. Case closed.

Or is it?

You see, it’s not just original human work that can be copywritten. Humans can take the works of others (humans, traditionally) and transform them into new works which can be copywritten as new pieces in their own right. 

As far as AI goes, this means that something like Midjourney can generate a picture with zero copyright, and then a human can transform it into something that can be copywritten. So, whatever transformation means, it’s key to commercial use of AI. And, at least till the law is changed, this means using pesky humans. Unfortunate for an industry who’re ostensibly in the business of replacing them.

How much humaning do they need though? 10%? 50%? As with many laws, it’s written to make lawyers enough for a second holiday home and a yacht rather than be clear to mere mortals. Or courts. This guarantees lots of protracted legal cases for the next decade or two. 

Transformative is an unhelpfully fuzzy term. However, companies want copyright control over important brand imagery. They need to know what they have to do to jump through that hoop if they’re going to use AI to generate the imagery on the first place. This is potentially a deal breaker, and it’s going to be a problem until the copyright law is changed. 

Requiring a human to intervene in a major way in the AI pipeline to make it copyrightable cuts against the idea that AI can avoid the need for skilled humans. This is a trend. While I see individuals using AI for various art and writing, very little of it is turning up unmodified in the public sphere. And that means we’re getting a new creative tool for humans to use, not a tool that replaces human creativity. At best (from the pro-AI POV), you might argue that it reduces the human to an art director rather than an artist. A different skill, and usually one done by an artist anyway, but not what’s being presented as the future of AI. I’m not sure that’s enough to satisfy the law on copyright either. It seems that the transformation must be hands on, and sufficiently invasive to count as having transformed the output into something entirely new. Hard to see how much of this is going to be done without a human artist in the loop. In fact, AI always requires a human. Nobody’s publishing substantial work without a human vetting it at some stage. Well, not without ending up in the news.

Despite all this, plenty of big players are already sacking folk to replace them with AI. But AI is a term that covers a lot of different areas within a large company, and using ChatGPT to write your emails isn’t the same as using Nano Banana to do your character design. While one seems (to me) legally safe, the other feels more nuanced. More of a challenge. After all, the AI companies haven’t borrowed billions of dollars on the promise that they’d replace a couple of secretaries. They want to put all creativity in the metaphorical hands of your toaster (I may be paraphrasing here). They need bigger wins. 

As far as jobs go, the cuts I’ve seen generally remove less skilled roles and add work to the higher skilled folk. That’s not a great long term strategy as the highly skilled folk don’t get where they are without going through the lower skilled stage, and without roles to train new folk in it’s going to be an interesting puzzle to solve. I suspect that the AI believers simply imagine that the whole requirement for humans will be written out any day, so this is something they can ignore. But, like the AI eating its own slop and the training going weird, I think it’s an issue they can’t ignore. Well, obviously they can and probably will ignore it, and it’ll come back and surprise them later, just as they seem to have been surprised by the current copyright. Too busy being clever and pleased with themselves to avoid all the unforced errors.  

Maybe They Should Have Considered This Sooner

What’s interesting to me is that while stealing training data is about the AI itself, most legal hurdles are reasons why the market might not use it. This is probably more concerning for the AI companies. After all, the best product in the world is no use without a paying audience. If AI can’t be easily used without falling into legal chasms, then the market will look elsewhere for their art. 

Humans, maybe. 

You and I have been witness to the greatest art heist in the planet’s history. Yup, today I want to talk about the underpinning of the current crop of Large Language Model (LLM) style AIs: the training data they scraped from across the internet, published works, and anything else they could get their digital paws on.

Compared to this, the recent Louvre break in was amateur hour, Vincenzo Peruggia was a lucky chancer, and even the stripping of artwork from across Europe to line the Nazi galleries barely warrants a footnote. Hyperbole? Kind of, but not entirely. 

On the one hand, the artwork hasn’t been removed. It’s still where it was to start with, pretending that nothing has happened. And the creators may even now be none the wiser. However, behind the scenes, a hugely consequential theft has taken place. 

Theft? Before we go any further, let me say that this is how I understand it. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve dealt with copyright cases a number of times in my years in the industry. Fundamentally, copyright law seems simple. A human creator makes a new work, and by the process of that creation they gain the copyright in it. They don’t have to claim it, the act of creation itself grants them rights (as long as they’re human). Other entities may not use that copywritten work for their own financial gain without permission. There are a few cut outs for what is broadly called Fair Use (FU, ironically), though this applies to reviews and education rather than profit-centred endeavours. So, let’s say I want to design and publish a Star Wars game. I’d need permission from the copyright holder to do so. If I wanted to teach a course on media studies, I could reference Star Wars as Fair Use without express permission. 

On the face of it, the AI case seems pretty simple. The LLM industry collectively scraped all the art and writing and music and code and anything else they could find and used it to train software with the express purpose of competing with and replacing those creators. I don’t think that’s up for debate. This isn’t Fair Use. It’s also done without consent or license, and is therefore theft. If I sold that imaginary Star Wars game I’d end up in court. I’ve been involved in cases where exactly this sort of thing happened. 

There are three things that muddy the waters.

Firstly, tech-enabled scale. We’ve never seen so much stolen from so many individuals, and stolen so quickly. It’s so brazen, and so blatantly immoral and uncaring of the harm it does that authorities have no clue how to react. The law has simply failed to keep pace with the crime. 

Secondly, Fair Use and Legitimate Interest (LI). We’ve already mentioned the former, and that’s used to defend all manner of stuff that it doesn’t legally cover. The second is far more problematic because it has some legit uses. 

Legitimate Interest basically means that there’s a good reason why someone might need to use your data without asking permission. For example, a bank must conform to money laundering and other laws, so they need to look at your data. The GDPR has a number of clauses under which someone could claim LI. Unfortunately, the last one is a catch-all that can be used to exploit the process. Sure, you could send in a request to ask them to explain themselves, and then debate whether that was reasonable, and so on through the complaints procedure and courts. Realistically, this is almost never going to happen, or be worth the effort, because it’s massively resource consuming and by that point they’ve already used your data anyway. If we’re talking about AI, then it’s buried in the training pool and isn’t removable. So, LI is another pseudo-legal smokescreen that the AI companies can use to steal your data. 

Remember that I said this series was about me exploring and learning? Well, this third point is where we come to the core of this aspect of AI, and it leads to my first major takeaway, and it’s a pragmatic rather than an immediately emotionally satisfying one.

So where was I? Oh, yes. The AI companies have plundered what they needed to start their work and continue to harvest whatever they can get away with. A few have built models on training data that they’ve asked permission to use, though this is a minority approach and mainly seems to be a marketing exercise. Despite this, overwhelmingly, LLMs are built on data that’s being used without permission of the legal owner. It is not FU or LI under those definitions. Calling this anything other than theft is, in my opinion, either deluded or intentionally misleading. 

The third, and most important point, is that nothing material is going to be done about this. At least, not in any major way. The legal system lags too far behind, the power and resource imbalance between AI companies and creators is laughably one-sided, and the politicians are clearly leaning on the side of their oligarch peers outside the odd occasion where they need to pretend to care for votes. 

None of this should surprise anyone. It’s not new, it’s just business as usual. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older or whether anything really has changed, but it feels to me that while this abuse of power has always been the way, it’s less masked than it was in my youth. The politicians and billionaires used at least to pretend to care a little. Now the corruption and nepotism are out in the open in a way that would make the Borgias blush. 

So, yes. It’s not good. Creators large and small have had their work taken and used without permission. Stolen, in other words. And outside a few cases that perform the social function of show trials to salve the public conscience (which I predict they will fail to impress), the legal system will side with the money and power, as is tradition.

What I think this means is that there’s no real point in complaining. It’s a new paradigm we live in. Assume that anything you show in public will be stolen without repercussion. We’re back in the pre-copyright days now. Of course, the law will still be used to prosecute you if you use stuff the big boys own without permission, but the far more consequential thefts by the giant AI companies will continue unchecked.

All of this may seem a bit dystopian and gloomy, and it’s certainly not sunshine and rainbows. However, it’s not really new. People with more money than you will ever see have always had this power. The only difference is that it’s being wielded more brazenly and being used to abuse creatives. That doesn’t make it right, and being angry is a sane response. It won’t, however, make any difference. 

So, what to do? It seems to me that you’ve got 3 choices. 

1. Take up an AK and lead the revolution against the capitalist running dogs of Big AI. Vanishingly small likelihood of success. Cannot recommend.
2. Rail against the unfairness of it all, post online, complain to your friends, etc. This reminds me of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When the Vogon’s arrive, Ford tells the barman that the world is about to be destroyed. “Aren’t we supposed to lie down or put a paper bag over our heads or something,” he says. “Will that help?” That’s what getting angry feels like to me. The answer is no, by the way. It won’t help. I think that you’re far better off putting your energies into the last option. 
3. There are sort of 2 versions of this, lurking under one umbrella. Overall, option 3 is simple: deal with it. The two possible flavours are coping by ignoring AI and coping by embracing it. You could blend your own middle ground, though purists will probably suggest that any use of AI is going to taint you. Whatever happens, in this third option you find your way to navigate the unfairness and lopsided immorality of it all. It’s never been fair or moral anyway, and this may be a useful wakeup call if you’d failed to notice previously. Whatever LLMs or subsequent AI forms do to the creative space, there will always be humans making things, and for the foreseeable future these will have a different place in the world to whatever software churns out. 

This last point is my takeaway from pondering this aspect of the current AI/LLM wave. The genie won’t be going back in the bottle, and the folk that let it out will not be held accountable for the damage they’ve done. 

One of the many lessons that decades of gaming has taught me is that you need to pick your fights. Some battles can’t be won. In this analogy, they have a million tanks and you have a pointed stick. It’s not a winnable position. Now, you don’t have to like it (you’d be strange if you did), but you stand far more chance of winning the game as a whole if you let this battle go. Reinforcing a loss is just a waste of your resources.

Realising this makes me think that the only useful way forward is to accept the shit sandwich they forced upon us, and move forward. Take your anger and channel that energy into getting better, learning more, finding your own way, because, at the end of the day, you are what you have most control over. Maybe the only thing. 

Let the AI companies do what they’re doing, just as you let the other human creators get on with their thing. It’s competition, it’s inspiration, and it’s background noise. Focus on yourself, your work, your skills and your progression. There was always someone better than you, and others who were less skilled. That hasn’t changed. Just now, some of it’s software. Learn, improve, and be the most exciting and interesting creator you can be. In a way, you should pity the poor AI. After all, for all its crass theft, and there was a lot of it, it can only copy, it cannot truly create. 

Maybe next week we should look at why this is a good thing.

In the world of modern creative arts, artificial intelligence (AI) is an unavoidable topic. So, I won’t be avoiding it here. 

Across the internet and beyond, all manner of articles and videos have already discussed it, and there’s lots of intriguing takes to see. However, all of these individual presentations feel to me like they’re missing important angles. I don’t think this is malice or foolishness on the part of the presenters, simply that the topic is too big, too fluid, and too nuanced to boil down to a single article, however good it may be. So, if I want to explore the topic, it’s going to need several bites at the cherry. This discussion of AI in creative work will be the topic of my Monday posts until I run out of things to explore.

My initial thought was to make this discussion of AI a separate blog entirely. I have no idea how long it will be and I didn’t want it to drown out everything else by lumping everything together. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was central to how people are likely to view creativity going forward. Whether you like AI, you hate AI, or you haven’t decided what you think, the genie is out of the bottle. It’s going to be around, and it’s probably going to play some important role. So, I want to understand the whole picture better than I do. I also think that it deserves to be discussed properly, at length, without the polemics and lynch mobs. Very little is entirely good or bad. I suspect this is also true of AI. Putting it in a Monday slot gives it room to breathe without letting it sprawl. 

Note that I don’t have all the answers. Unlike my Thursday posts, which are the fruits of over 40 years of experience, my thoughts on the current version of AI haven’t properly coalesced. So this series is even more than usual a case of me learning alongside you. I’m sure that whatever I think I might want to discuss now, by the time you’ve had your say in the comments I’ll have a bunch more to ponder. In fact, I’m counting on it. 

Also, as I dig into this topic, I expect to refine and change my views. That’s OK. It’s expected. Necessary, in fact. At the moment, my overall view is that I don’t know. Seems to me that both fanboys and nay-sayers have failed to prove their case. But I need to look at this more. There are aspects of AI that I think on the face of it are definitely bad. There are aspects of AI that I suspect have quite good applications. But as a whole, I don’t really know, and there’s a whole bunch of unclarity in the middle, which makes AI as a topic fuzzy in my head.

Finally, critically, we need to remember that we’re very much at the start of this process. As with every other major technological change, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Currently, I don’t think she’s even on stage.