What were you doing on Wednesday night? More than 150 of you were with us for our sold-out #vtjtalks event on ChatGPT, robotics, and how AI will change everything. And boy was it the hot ticket.
Unsurprisingly, GPT was the centre of debate. (If you need a refresher, ChatGPT launched at the end of November, and is able to provide detailed and instantaneous answers in natural language to pretty much anything you ask.) It’s a given that AI with generative capabilities will force us to question what “creativity” means. No human art, for instance, exists in a vacuum — the Dutch masters wouldn’t be painting without the influence of Renaissance artists — so some argue that generative AI follows the same process. But for me, the most interesting part of the panel explored the law’s role in shaping what artificial intelligence will look like in the future.
Getty Images is, for instance, suing AI image generator Stable Diffusion because it scraped its database without permission. But the legal quandary goes further. GPT can write in the style of particular journalists — because it downloads a whole load of articles unauthorized. If you’ve ever uploaded photos or art, written a review, “liked” content, answered a question on Reddit, contributed to open source code, or done any number of other activities online, your work is likely part of GPT too.
Much of AI’s future, and its capabilities, will be determined by lawsuits. Tools like GPT produce content only by parsing through billions of items in a dataset — and legal action will determine what those datasets can be made of.
Oh, and a heads up — all the panelists agree that AI is coming for your job.
Today’s briefing is 960 words: a three-minute read.
-Kate, @KateWilsonSays
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