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An AI World

I don’t often write about technology issues but you don’t have to look far these days to hear or read about how artificial intelligence (AI) is going to improve all our lives. Indeed the first elements of AI ‘assistance’ have recently arrived in mobile phones and photograph enhancement. Increasingly new technology invades our life’s, often in subtle ways, producing both good and bad results. You only have to see how digital imaging and the internet radically altered the photography landscape over the past thirty years to realise how quickly things can change. Even the image above for this post was created using AI.

It’s not all bad news. Over the past year, AI technology has increasingly helped solved a number of small family photograph problems. I’ll talk about that in another post, but suffice to say that I’ve been impressed with what even basic AI can achieve when it comes to photography enhancement. The tool I probably find the most useful are the resizing options now available enabling me to increase the size of a digital file so that it can be printed. The photograph of my Grandad celebrating the end of the war on May 8th 1945, and posted on the Darker Skies blog, was a good example of a very small image file enhanced to finally get a print.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just help create though. It also consumes. It learns from other content available online and that is where the AI issue starts to become slightly more concerning.

Feeding the Algorithm

As you would expect, this photography website holds the a substantial part of my photographic output from over the last thirty years. A small select number of images go back even further than that. I’m not a huge fan of the word content especially if used to describe me as a ‘content creator’. I think that term does a disservice to the millions of great creative people out there working away. Content creator does, however, in one go, cover a multitude of practices. We all put our lives, talent and skills out onto the internet. Sometimes that is rewarded with cash, mostly it’s just about putting it out to the world for people to see it. We all want to be seen, right?

Here is where alarm bells have started ringing. Good quality content has value and yet increasingly it looks like the AI companies do NOT want to pay for it. Already we have seen where authors have found AI models were trained on the text of their books without any thought of copyright or payment. After reading a couple of posts on the Cloudflare blog a few things have started to become clearer, or at least become more of a concern for where AI and our content is heading. The core of the post deals with something that we’ve all known about for a long time. We are the product. Our content adds value to all of the platforms we use, but increasingly the tech companies seem to be taking that for granted. Even worse, they seem to want to make money out of our content, leaving us out of the deal.

Blocking the Bots

Over the last few weeks, the website has started using Cloudflare’s blocking system to stop AI bots from accessing content on the site. Is it bolting the door after the horse has bolted? Possibly, and it will be difficult to ascertain what has already been searched by the AI training bots, but at least it is some kind of fightback. ChatGPT and others are still allowed access as they are quickly gaining ground over the search box as a way of finding information. Not all the bots are bad, but exploiting content creators to monetize an AI service at the expense of artists, photographers, musicians, filmmakers is not the best route to take.

No AI crawl without compensation! Its a fine idea. Pay creators for their content. it’s not a revolutionary idea but one that’s fair to the people whose creative talents have given the bots something the crawl in the first place. Business models are changing and we have to adapt to them, just as we have adapted to previous technological changes. It’s not going to be easy and I’m, like most people, a bystander when it comes to understanding what’s going on. I rely on others who know more to help me make a decision. Awareness is key otherwise the AI might, just might, not just take an inch. They’ll take a mile!

A Question of Redress

Yes, it’s all about money. Meta, Google and others want to make it with AI services, but the question remains, do they want to reward those who contribute to the AI learning process? So far it seems not. Working in the creative industry is tough. Very tough! Increasingly it is getting harder and harder to make a living as technology becomes a substitute for skill. For talented people to flourish it needs their work to be appreciated both aesthetically and financially. High quality content creators, artists etc need to be valued. Sadly it appears that many of the larger tech companies see us ALL as just a resource to be tapped

Relevant Links

Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content