Protecting Artists, Free Speech And The Meaning Of Education

There’s such a wide range of issues that confront those of us who are looking closely at the race towards more powerful artificial intelligence.

There are questions about how humans coexist with AI, how we harness its potential the right way, and how it affects things like jobs and education.

I wanted to cover some of the points that I’ve been hearing about how this works.

Human Value and Intellectual Property

One of the overarching themes as people talk about AI and job displacement is that we have to value people, and help them to keep control of their own data.

For example, if an AI starts to take a human’s past work and replicate it somehow, that’s going to devalue what the human is still offering to the job market. I’ve covered these types of concerns so often in assessing how AI is entering the market, and notable people from Tim Berners-Lee and Will.i.am to various MIT academics have told us that we need to keep an eye on who owns people’s data.

In a wide ranging interview with Randall Lane (of Forbes) and University of Chicago president Paul Alivisatos, we can see an example of this type of protection in action. Alivisatos notes that a team at the university found that an AI was replicating the works of a human artist, and so they took steps to make those works harder to imitate with a tool called Nightshade.

“Nightshade will alter the visual art such that it’s much more difficult for the AI to adjust it and then create that style,” he said. “So now future works are copyright protected, whether you know the company that’s ingesting it has thought about that, or not.”

The Role of Open Debate

Another thing that was central in this interview was the idea of free speech, and community discussion of issues.

Lane referred to the “Chicago principles,” which include the idea that university shouldn’t put their thumbs on the scale, but should allow faculty students and others to speak their minds.

Alivisatos referred to a Chicago booklet that highlights some of this way of thinking.

“Chicago principles are at the core of being a truth-seeking institution,” he said. “It goes all the way back to 1900 when William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, gave a speech called “free expression in the university.” And he laid out the principles: we will always allow faculty and students to speak their minds. The university itself will not take a position telling people what to think, because that’s just so destructive to free expression.”

He suggests that Chicago “got it right” while other universities were struggling with the words and actions of their administrators, and experiencing a lot of turmoil over certain issues.

Educating Tomorrow’s Student

What does it mean to be an educated person? Alivisatos asked.

He suggested that employers want employees with humanism and social science skills, but acknowledged that it’s hard to get there, given the investment that students have to make in their own education.

“The one thing we do teach students, you know, we’re going back to that core curriculum every day,”
he said. “We’re saying, learn to listen to other people share your idea, but be happy when somebody challenges you, because that may help you actually find the truth, which we’re trying to do.”

These are all parts of the debate that we’re having when it comes to the emergence of AI in our world. How are we going to integrate it into the job market, and our philosophy around economics and business? That’s just one aspect of how we treat AI as digital intelligence that we have to coexist with, suddenly, in our world.