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A Digital God is Born

-- By JaredHopper - 05 Dec 2023

Introduction

It's December 2023, and the deluge of advertisers (Apple, Sony, IMB, Paramount, Disney) bailing on X/Twitter continues. The activity is purportedly based on reports that Elon Musk, the now-owner of the social media monolith X, had boosted rhetoric supporting antisemitic conspiracy theories. Of course major consumer-facing brands wouldn't want advertisements shown next to such content, but Elon didn't take this in stride. Instead, he is threatening to sue some of the groups that originally pointed out the dangerous rhetoric on his site. He isn't hiding behind lawyers and tweets in expressing his contempt for what he seems to think are "disloyal" companies, but he is getting in front of camera to do so. In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, the topic of AI came up in a conversation about X/Twitter's content moderation in light of the advertising controversy. X/Twitter not only been using AI technology to shape the featuring of particular content, but Musk has started has started feeding tweets to his own AI program to "train it." Notably, in response to a question about the implications of copyright law and AI learning, Musk responded that "by the time these [copyright] lawsuits are decided, we'll have Digital God." Absurd diction aside, it's worth thinking about the nexus between the increasingly capable technology with the limited legal protections we have for artists. If AI will become "Digital God," are creators merely meant to bow down to this new, thieving creator?

Current Case Study: AI Set Designs

Legal and ethical questions surrounding copyright liability for users of AI to "create" in the artistic space have already emerged in a handful of contexts, but I think it would be useful to talk about one in particular due to its association with the purest form of creativity: the theater. Set designers have an important job, and as producers seek to cut costs more and more, designers are pressured (and probably required in some spaces) to create a less physical and therefore burdensome set and, instead, use digital screens for seamless and cost-effective scene transitions. Such "AI Set Design" began floating around on social media about a year ago, and many are excited about the visual outputs already created. Some set designers are, perhaps surprisingly, actively encouraging using AI in their designs; they are so certain that their jobs will not be replaced and that AI really is just "computer assisted drawing" that will prove more helpful than harmful. But what about the source material for these AI interfaces? They aren't just able to compete with the Tony Award-winning set designers out there without reason, and that reason is that they are learning from the IP of preexisting designers. When asked about OpenAI? 's claims that their AI is not using copyrighted information to learn, Musk brusquely responded that "that's a lie." And unlike with human copyright infringement claims, an algorithm cannot (or should not be able to) claim that a work, though inspired by another's, is independently created to skirt liability. But is it really that different from a human artist? In catching myself thinking thoughtlessly, I wonder if AI learning from peer artists is really just what other, human, artists do, but far more efficiently. Are we ok with this efficiency? Ethically, it seems to cut against the rallying cries of human collaboration and creativity that come from the theater, but, as conversations about the set design of the currently touring production of The Wiz shows, there is still tremendous shame in its designers' admitting to AI use for what seems to be the bulk of the set's visuals.

Ramifications for Creatives on X/Twitter

Opening up these questions to Musk's new AI baby is necessary for those who consider the above AI use for set design plagiaristic. The problem in talking more specifically about using a platform like X/Twitter as creative fodder for AI is that it necessitates talking about many different kinds of copyright concerns. Not only do we have the same initial (ethical? legal?) concern about AI directly basing its designs off of preexisting work without the creative spark we have been told is innately human, but there is also the difficulty of copyright protections generally on the social media website. X/Twitter is, at its most viral, a collaborative space where users build off of one another to make a point or a joke, for instance. In the situation where someone is retweeting (who knows what this verb is now after the X rebrand) another's post, the "creative content" in question is both the retweeter and the original tweeter. If we were to even think about integrating a tracking component into AI that could potentially credit or be transparent about whose work it is using in making a specific creative output, the difficulty in the social media space is even figuring out, in the first instance, who deserves the credit in the legal, and ethical sense.

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