Would you like AI with that?

I feel like I can’t spend a day without some AI bot asking me if I need help. Well, I do need help! But sadly they won’t do the washing, feed the animals or change the sheets so I can just write. They would rather DO the writing! But that’s my job…isn’t it?

It sounded like a bit of fun with new technology a few months ago, but, as they say, things are getting real. So what does that mean for aspiring creators? What does it mean for everyone?

I’m old enough to remember when automatic teller machines were being proposed. I worked in my first job at the Reserve Bank in the clearing house, and on slow days we spent time chatting and we couldn’t imagine a world where tellers would be replaced. Just shows how limited our imaginations were.

The clearing house was where cheques came to be sorted to be returned to their bank of origin. It was labour intensive, quite boring work, but it was how it was done. We would manually sort the cheques, then process them through a wiz bang sorting machine, make sure everything tallied. Then I would pack them in suitcases and carry them, with a guard, to the clearing house up stairs at the National Bank. Once there, we would swap our bundles and compare tallies and then take our own cheques back to our bank. That’s why it took so long for cheques to be cleared. It was manual work.

That job no longer exists. Eight floors of the Reserve Bank in Hobart are no longer part of the bank and the clearing house? I think that disappeared in the late eighties. Technology made those jobs redundant and so those jobs went the way of other labour intensive jobs. I remember when my manager at the Commonwealth Employment Service lost his assistant. With a computer on his desk, it was more efficient for him to write his own correspondence. We did chuckle at the brevity of memos, sans capitals and punctuation, as a man who had never typed faced the reality of his new world.

Jobs have been disappearing as technology takes over, but should it apply to human creativity? Is this a step too far?

I read recently the creators of AI harvested the works of our most amazing creators to ‘teach’ AI how to write. Did they ask? No. Did they pay? No. Did they in any way honour the legal and moral copyright of lifetimes of incredibly hard work? No, they did not and legal action is being taken!

It’s made me so angry that the creators of AI, who no doubt trademark and legally protect their programming, have completely ignored and disrespected the legal and moral rights of other creators!

But where does that leave the aspiring writer, like myself? Is there any point? Well I say YES and I say it loudly. Writing comes from the soul and every writer is compelled to write. It’s part of them. Can AI do it better? Probably better than me, but should we let it?

I can see the copyright notice in books changing to exclude being used for AI. Amazon has differentiated between AI produced and AI assisted. But do we need to do more? Or have we left it too late?

Personally I think governments need to legislate to include humanity clauses, conferences and input before any new AI products are licensed but is that even enough? Creators are low paid, and therefore lack the power of huge tech companies. The future looks grim, but we can help.

Buy books and art work you know was produced by people. Refuse to buy AI produced ‘fiction’ and ‘art’.

There is a place for AI. It’s a great assistant. We have come too far to go back but we can choose how much it impacts our lives.

AI could build me a website. I do lack in that department. But I promised myself the reward of paying a human to do it when I get my first contract and I’m sticking to that.

So when the next bot asks me, ‘Do you want AI with that?’ My answer will be, no thanks. I’ll struggle on without it. The work, perfecting craft, learning new skills, is the soul of the journey. And creating IS a journey, not a destination.

How will AI help or hinder your life?