Confessions of an AI virgin

Okay, sorry, clickbait title, I know.

My only ‘confession’ is that I've never consciously used AI. I say ‘consciously' because obviously, AI is increasingly embedded in lots of things we use, often without our knowledge. What I mean is that I've never gone onto an AI platform (or clicked on an AI icon) and typed in a prompt.

This post should, perhaps, more accurately be entitled “The dilemma of an AI virgin.” My dilemma? Whether or not I should give in and start using AI.

I should probably start by explaining why I've been an AI abstainer thus far. It’s because I have fundamental ethical objections to the way AI companies operate and concerns about the environmental effects of huge data centres.  

I vehemently object to the fact the AI companies have based their business model on the wholesale theft of intellectual property (my own included) to train their models without the consent of or any compensation to the owners of that material. Why would I support any business based on blatantly illegal (whatever they've claimed in the courts) and indisputably immoral practices? Especially an industry that then goes on to use that stolen material to damage the career prospects of those very people they've stolen from: the writers, artists and musicians who produced all that ‘content' their models are based on.

From an environmental viewpoint, there are all kinds of arguments to be had about the environmental impacts of data centres in terms of consuming precious energy and water resources. Yes, I'm sure they're improving in efficiency and using more sustainable sources of energy, but they're also expanding exponentially and a small amount of resources multiplied many times becomes a large amount. Of course, you can also make comparisons to the resources used for all kinds of other activities. However, I question whether we should be adding a huge extra source of consumption at a time when we're all talking about reducing our environmental impact. And there may be an argument for resources used to come up with new medical treatments or improve people's lives in other ways, but is it worth it to produce frivolous memes or endless unwelcome slop or even to save someone a couple of minutes bothering to compose their own email?

All very strong arguments, you might say, but the cat's well and truly out of the bag now, so aren't you just shouting into the wind? (I'm not sure if that's even an idiom, but I didn't think I'd better use the more obvious verb!) While I don't necessarily agree that's a reason to give up on my ethical principles, I do concede that sometimes you have to be pragmatic about the realities of a situation.

The real thing that's starting to niggle away for me, though, is the fear of being left behind. How long can I hold out before my lack of expertise in AI starts to actively become a handicap, professionally and maybe personally? How long can I leave it and still catch up if need be?

I've recently become increasingly aware of how disadvantaged my parents are by their lack of ability around modern technology. My dad has a laptop and some basic knowledge of how to do very simple stuff online, but he often struggles with tasks I find obvious and intuitive. And he's completely flummoxed if the layout of a familiar website changes. He's never got on with smartphones and while he has one, it's mostly switched off in a drawer, and he struggles even to make and answer calls. My mum has never used any kind of computer or mobile phone. For years, it wasn't really a problem because they were able to carry on doing most things as they'd always done them, using old school methods instead. Now though, they're increasingly being shut out of everyday tasks like banking, booking holidays and even handling medical appointments.

It's served to make me aware of not letting myself fall behind. I have maybe another 10 years or so of working life, and it may be that I can get by without having to actively use AI. I'd like to think I can continue to find ways to successfully leverage my human skills and expertise instead, but is that something I can safely bank on? Or it may be that when push comes to shove, I'll just be able to pick it up. But I can't be sure and I don't know how long I can continue to take the risk. That leaves me with a flurry of questions:

• How long can I hold out and still catch up? It’s less the practicalities of using the actual tools I’m thinking of, than the general feel of how to get the best out of them: the AI literacy.
• Is it enough to be an informed observer from the sidelines, as I am at the moment?
• Is it better to get up to speed now before I’m pushed into it?
• If I don’t have a real immediate use for AI, should I be wasting resources just playing around with pointless stuff in order to learn?

At the moment, my answers and inclinations are changing from one day to the next.

 

Language data and permissions: AI vs corpora

Like everyone else lately, I haven’t been able to avoid hearing about generative AI, including a session at last week’s Freelancers’ AwayDay. One point in the debates around it though has jumped out at me, in particular. The language data collected to train the large language models that power the likes of ChatGPT is scraped from the internet with no attempt to get permission from the original creators of those texts. This has raised alarm bells with writers such as the US Authors Guild who are taking action on the issue.

As a lexicographer, I work with very large collections of language data every day: corpora. Working with publishers’ corpora on materials for publication I’m very aware that permission and copyright are issues we absolutely don’t ignore. The multi-billion-word corpora collected and held by dictionary publishers contain material that has been added with the permission of the copyright holders. This is generally the publishers of the texts rather than the individual writers allowing for the collection of large quantities of data, such as all the newspapers published by a particular media group or all the academic journals from a certain academic publisher.

That permission also comes with restrictions on how the data can be used. Specific agreements vary between corpora, but they usually include limitations about the length of excerpts that can be used, not generally a big problem when you need short dictionary examples. We are also generally required to edited examples drawn from a corpus so that they’re not obviously identifiable. Very ‘vanilla’ examples that could have come from anywhere – She left and closed the door behind her. – can safely be copied as they are, but any references to real people, places, events, or organizations will usually be removed, and often replaced with the minister, a company spokesperson, in the region, etc. Incidentally, this also has the advantage that the examples are less likely to date and will be accessible to a wider audience because they rely less on culturally-specific references.

As lexicographers, we do occasionally turn to other sources to research language, especially when we’re looking at new or niche uses for which we may have scant corpus evidence. In these cases, our editors are even more insistent about the need for caution. Ideally, we’ll refer to online sources to confirm how a word is being used, then try to make use of the few corpus examples we do have, informed by what we’ve seen elsewhere, to come up with appropriate example sentences.

I should note that I’m specifically talking about publishers’ corpora here. There are, of course, plenty of corpora out there, including numerous web corpora, where the issues around permission and copyright are very different. Many of these were originally collected for academic purposes, i.e. principally to research language usage rather than to publish commercial materials. They should also come along with notes about how they can be used – although I wonder how many users actually read the small print.

As writers ourselves, in whatever form, I think we should be especially aware of how the content we create is being used, and potentially abused, with and without our permission, and crucially, in turn, have respect for how we use the intellectual property of others.