This article is machine translated by Google from Norwegian
When I studied at Berkeley i California over 30 years ago, we discussed the new phenomenon Artificial Intelligence (KI), and the significance of this. The philosopher John Searle talked about the Chinese room – could you tell if it was a machine or a human who answered on the other end? Patricia Churchland, popular within Cognitive Science and for the book Neurophilosophy (1986), argued against our fellow philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus, which argued that AI machines could not achieve human expertise. The latter probably preferred Churchland & co. as eleminative materialists – where they considered our consciousness to be a computer.
Well, today supercomputers have and Bigtech gained a capacity that allows AI to approach human capacity, replacing skills and communication in an increasing number of fields.
Chat GPT
Among today's constantly new chatbots with artificial intelligence – communicative apps we humans 'talk' with – much is now being written about the newer Chat GPT from OpenAI, made by the company Elon Musk helped start in 2015 (he developed self-driving Teslas, after all).
Within a few months, ChatGPT has gained over 100 million users – I myself am one of them. As an editor, I submitted a text from a writer and received responses to its weaknesses and possible improvements. And ChatGPT elegantly translated a text from English to Norwegian. And when asked, I got an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of two competing video cutting apps. Also: One of MODERN TIMES's writers generated an article about Dag Solstad (see page 55) with ChatGPT in Norwegian.
Other visual programs such as DALL · E 2 from the same OpenAI, or midjourney (runs inside the discord.com system) creates images from sentences you write. For example, I received suggestions for several 'photos' of couples in a sailboat with wine glasses in the sunset, and as defined – with dolphins in the background. Or see the author Maurice Blanchot (pictured) where MidJourney generated four pictures of him writing. Why? yes, see the end of this text.
But what challenges does such new communication technology, based on huge databases and powerful collection algorithms (from the internet), and new 'learning' from the activity of millions of users raise? I can think of three, with their pros and cons:
Firstly: That the work of thought which lies behind articles, books, speeches, research, art and homework, will be diluted. Well, even if what has been expressed in text and thinking throughout the ages has always been somewhat parasitic on what others have written or said. But what happens when a teacher, editor or publisher can no longer tell much of a difference between what is delivered by a person or a machine? We're not talking about 'plagiarism' here, are we? Some are now discussing being able to 'watermark' what ChatGPT produces, to reveal who is behind it – but that is too complicated.
Secondly: What ChatGPT can do in Norwegian within a few seconds give you advice on requests that you would normally ask a lawyer, accountant, politician or psychologist? Some of these will be unemployed in the future – including authors and publishers with useful specialist books. And who needs a long education as a lawyer (to read the law book?), an engineer (when machines calculate) or a cultural worker (when reports and expressions can be generated) – which lie behind such information or communication professions? (One employer said they got more efficient employees via ChatGPT, but it probably won't be long before he starts reducing his staff.)
Third: Who wants to own or have copyright on information, texts, algorithms and images in the future – when ChatGPT and other such AI-based programs create new texts and images with fragments of other people's work, databases and an internet full of letters, program codes and graphics? Will it be possible for artists and writers to get paid for individual work, and what about the income of large image agencies and publishers?
Is not digital property rights both exaggerated as something 'individual' and aft?
But ask yourself: Isn't digital #property right both exaggerated as something 'individual' and neglected in terms of how technology, algorithmsr and practices are shared and copied today? Finished digital 'products' have no material scarcity and can therefore be easily copied and distributed – whether it is a report, an article, a picture, a work of art or a film. The owners will still be able to track 'illegal' copying or use online for a while. But today, lawsuits are only filed against established organizations or companies, as it is not worthwhile to pursue the 'copies' that have been taken by private individuals or posted on small websites. But with artificial intelligence, when the copy is a collection of fragments from several texts, images or entirely new expressions temporarily created by algorithms, this becomes difficult to pursue.
The impersonal
Are we really facing a major change of 'the personal' – sort of filosofin Roberto Esposito have in the book Terms of the Political (2008) and Third person (2013) criticized the concept itself or our perception of what a person is. He criticizes the modern understanding of the individual as based on a false dualism between the personal and the impersonal. In modern society, individualism is put before the community, which has led to crises in politics and society. Esposito suggests with the term impersonal community a community that recognizes our dependence, necessary relationships and the shared life we humans fundamentally have. He emphasizes here the 'third person' - as distinct from 'I' and 'you' – as something more humane universal, as it is legally used by Simone Because. Or 'the outside', as Gilles says Deleuze search itself immanently, the jointly created reality and language here among us.
Esposito bases this on a criticism that 'persons' have traditionally taken privileges, such as in the Roman Empire, where the head of the family ruled over both children, wife and slaves more or less as 'things' rather than 'persons' – who were at his disposal. This idea that someone stands above others, who can easily be killed, as they are 'non-persons', is also something the philosopher Giorgio agamben has written about in his 'Homo Sacer' series.
My point here is whether the copyright of a work should really be interpreted more as a common property – and that we should therefore welcome ChatGPT, even if today it 'steals' an enormous amount of knowledge, artwork and linguistic erudition.
Maurice Blanchot
Also French Maurice Blanchot is useful for this paradigm shift away from the person or individual focus: As the poststructuralist that he was, Blanchot pointed out that the very authorone should ideally disappear from the text – rather than the author using himself as the narrator, the text should almost play itself out with ongoing events. The text should be "autonomous" and the author should use a "neutral voice". The work could 'speak' for itself without an I-narrator or an I-you dialogue. Rather via a 'third person'. The artist is considered by Blanchot rather as a "servant of the work" and not as its creator. This impersonal had consequences in literary theory – where rather the reader's role as interpreter was emphasized more.
And isn't it precisely this devaluation of the 'creator' of a work that happens with ChatGPT, when the answers produced by its artificial intelligence are mostly fragments from others that you stand on the shoulders of? Should this change the entire economic paradigm, to an open shared community, with open access to most things that can be copied? Isn't it time that more people who deal with text, art and other produced works, used by systems like ChatGPT, are pushed forward by social wage or #citizen's salary rather than having to struggle separately to recover money from copyright and licences?
Only then, helped by ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, will we get what many have promoted – a real freebie creative common#, a creative community.
