How Scared are You of AI?

“How scared are you of AI?” is a useless question because it is here to stay, and it will learn more. As FDR said in 1933, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". So rather than fear Artificial Intelligence, we need to accept and understand it. Then we can think about how to manage it. Most probably, my Missives have not attracted too many heads of industry, but should there be just one, I do hope that they are studying how to train their staff on how to cope with this seismic change. Microsoft is already doing so.

We do know that change scares everyone, but we usually learn to cope with all the positives and negatives that come with. I keep telling my wife that I have the same frustrations she has with these damn machines,…well, that is what my father called the computer. I tell her to try to enjoy all the advantages that it offers. As an art historian, she needed the 4,000-book art library we brought from New York, but within a few years, much of that information could be found online.

One could write a book on the fear of change in the past, but here is just one example. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. People were immediately scared that it might cause deafness, or even transmit diseases, and with the early party lines, there was great concern about privacy. Even now, privacy is an issue as we resent the unwanted phone calls. That ringing at all hours on the land line may give you a start, as it does me. Increasingly, people abandon landlines for cell phones that can be put on vibrate or set to do not disturb. Have you seen a phone booth lately?!

We welcome the convenience of information provided by Alexa or Siri, but we worry they might be recording our conversations.

All this to say that we need to manage this new-fangled aid known as AI. Much of that needs to be done by the individual, more needs to be done by responsible corporations, and maybe most by government regulation.

One prime example is the fear or actual use of original publications of books and scientific papers. The laws of copyright started in Great Britain as the “Statute of Anne” in 1710. One of the big changes since then has been that copyright has extended for longer than the original 14 years, with possible renewal. Now, over 300 years later, it needs more revision, and that can only be done by the government and laws. It will be more complicated now, and I am not qualified to suggest how it could be done, but only hope that when it is, those regulations are as clear and understandable as possible.

In the field of art, we already have law and case law governing forgery, i.e., copying another artist’s work and claiming it to be by the original artist. The issue of borrowing too much from another’s work, which is covered by copyright law, was addressed in the case of The Warhol Foundation vs. Goldsmith. Andy Warhol created a series of silkscreen prints and pencil illustrations based on a copyrighted 1981 photograph of the musician Prince, taken by Lynn Goldsmith. Warhol made some aesthetic changes to Goldsmith’s original photograph, but they remained “recognizably derived” from the original. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the photographer.

Another positive event for those who fear for the arts; a week ago, the Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal of lower courts’ decisions since 2018 that a work of art created by AI could not be copyrighted because a copyright can only be granted to a work created by a human being.

The advent of each new form of technology has been greeted with fear, be it the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, or the computer. What has changed is the pace. It is all happening so quickly that we feel we don’t have time to catch up. I believe that as we find each new element useful, we will adopt and adapt it as we have before.