There's a weird phenomenon happening when it comes to AI "theft"

AI…

There’s a fierce debate raging on both sides of the spectrum, and I’ve been watching it, consuming it, and considering it from all angles over the past few years.

It’s beginning to look a lot like politics. In a way, it’s already political on several levels. Just look at all the people who made billions this year since they all stood on the platform at the inauguration in January.

Be that as it may, the existence of the technology itself isn’t in question. It’s a double-edged sword that’s being handed out to every single individual across the planet.

There are already casualties.

It’s not a question of whether you’ll use it or not (because you already have been for a while now).

It’s a question of how you will intentionally apply it moving forward.

At the end of the day, it’s a model — a very sophisticated probability construct with a multitude of variables trained on the collective input of everything we’ve created and placed within its digital reach. The nature of the data is what angers those who are fiercely against its existence. Regardless of permission or consent, the large language model is evolving and growing every single day.

Yes, artists, writers, creators all deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. Piracy, plagiarism, and all manner of theft has always been an issue. AI amplifies these aspects of extractive corruption and scales it, levelling the playing field of human creativity in ways that the printing press, the camera, the radio, the television, and the internet could not.

The “original sin” of technology

AI prompters are now howling about how other prompters are “stealing” their work. The irony is certainly lost on them.

Humans are smaller organic language models. Don’t tell me that you haven’t pirated music, movies, or used tracing paper to create that amazing picture of Spiderman in the third grade…

Once something has been internalized, it can be buried within your psyche. But it cannot be fully unlearned or unseen. You can’t purge the experience. Whatever you do or say or think will be subtly influenced by those events for the rest of your life. Eighty billion neurons in your brain are rewired a little bit every second.

You won’t, and can’t, fully know how you came up with the insights that lead you to do something. We craft narratives, stories, parables of how things came to be. We imagine and repurpose and create things based on a million inputs from a lifetime of choices. When artists do it, they can share their process, their inspirations, their motivations…somewhere in there are influences that are composites of both “legitimate” and “illicit” materials, whether they are aware of them or not.

Everything that exists today was “stolen” from those who came before us. We are Promethean in nature. We can’t help but want to take something beautiful and attempt to recreate it for ourselves. the only difference is intentionality and judgment now. The effort in striving to bring forth something that is unique rather than duplicated is where humanity is most powerful.

Your identity is unique. It can’t be duplicated. AI will never completely capture your essence. At best, it can only replicate a vertical slice of your current existence. Unless there’s a way someday to completely map your brain down to the neuron, there’s no way digitally archive you a la Brainiac.

The technology is here to stay. Running after it and demanding that it suppress or ignore or otherwise purge the data that it’s trained on is a fool’s errand. Any victory achieved in this endeavor is short-lived and futile at this point.

So where do I stand?

The slop that is already out there is just going to continue growing.

AI is powerful for many things that we don’t care to do and that we simply cannot do. Big data analysis, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, enhanced education, and more are where this technology shines. Using it to replace interactions and relationships, to remove the struggles of growing and doing things that matter to us as human beings, these are the ways it can be abused.

We are stealing meaning from our own lives by using it in this way.

I’ve been using AI for about a year now. I enjoy using it for quick research and brainstorming about things and to provide primers on subjects that I have no clue about. I use it to provide insights into my writing and suggestions for where to go to dig deeper. I’ve even used it to plan out and structure topics that I want to write about…

What I don’t really have a taste for is when I ask it to analyze my writing style.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is something that I have to work at without asking AI to rewrite it for impact. Whatever I’ve provided for it in the past has always ended up sounding bland…eloquently and elegantly bland. AI is the great leveler. It smooths all the wrinkles out of the creativity process like bad botox. Inject it in the wrong places, and everything just looks weird and puffy.

Natural progression in expressing yourself and developing your style is far slower…but it’s also much more satisfying in the long-term.

As the saying goes: “the struggle is real.”