Having dinner with my sister was the highlight of my week.
Meeting Malcolm Gladwell was a close second.
There is an odd aura one senses in the presence of an intellectual genius; an electricity akin to a mad scientist of words filled with stories that they could easily convey in an endless stream if unimpeded by both time and prior commitments. Mr. Gladwell had likely heard the "I love your books" opener a thousand times, so it was a pleasure to see his eyes and face light up when a colleague I was with mentioned their Jamaican heritage. It would have been nice if I had thought of something; with only a dozen or so people with the privilege to meet the man at a private reception, the math was on my side, but the memory will have to suffice as it stands. His writing on "overstories" and how they shape society fascinates me, and the more I think about AI in its current form within art, the more I ponder how we can shape it.
I had made reservations at a quaint Mexican restaurant for 7:30 PM on a Friday night and embarked around 7:00 PM; I imagined I would arrive with five minutes to spare to great fanfare. Braving the October cold and enjoying my brisk walk, my eyes glazed over in a sudden panic when my phone buzzed with a text message from my sister at 7:03 PM.
Paying for parking. I'll be there in five minutes.
I'm sorry. What?
Ah, the old sibling miscommunication. I had made previous, cancelled reservations for 7 PM elsewhere. My sister, in her fame, juggles enough projects and numbers that somewhere, somehow, that particular time became an engrained number in her mind and so, naturally, dinner with her older brother was at 7 PM.
In my defense, I still arrived five minutes early, but now looked late.
My sister flagged me down from a booth in the back, I walked past the judgmental eyes of the waitstaff who now thought I was late, and we began to catch up over drinks and guacamole. After I was sufficiently liquored up and began downing my (massive) chicken empanada, I opened the floodgates of AI in art with the oh so simple, "What do you think?"
I recognized that look in her eyes and that smile.
Here we go.
My sister, an incredibly talented artist and deeply intelligent woman, is vehemently opposed to AI beyond personal, private use and doesn't believe it can achieve the "ethical" vision I see. She is not one to shy away from her opinions and political leanings, and while I like to believe myself a well read and educated human being, her questions often caught me off guard in a manner I found refreshing...if not mildly exhausting... (though the cocktails may have attributed to that.) In my semi drunken stupor, I began to talk about the parallels of AI and the invention of photography to which my sister, gently reminding her meandering brother, interrupted the tangent with:
"You do remember I majored in photography, right?"
I nodded as I stuffed my face with empanada.
As my sister politely put it, I am an "optimist".
In the end, I had found we were in two very different camps. Whereas I see AI, if executed correctly, as a potential tool to help the marginalized artist, my sister sees it as a tool that can be used to exploit them. I quietly rejoiced at our one and only commonality: open source AI that plagiarizes the work of others without consent is incredibly problematic.
I will take agreeing to this as a milestone.
However, there was something mentioned in our discussion that piqued my interest and sparked an inner dialogue: the fear that even this so called "Ethical" AI can lead to exploitation. To paraphrase, if a struggling, marginalized artist with no opportunity finds that their only option for success is to sell their proprietary material to a large organization that manages an Ethical AI service, what security and guarantee is there that they will be paid anything resembling a fair royalty or fee? Along those lines, how can it be guaranteed that an artist submitting their work to an Ethical AI database isn't being fraudulent themselves and stealing from lesser-known creators? In her eyes, it would create the equivalent of a digital sweatshop. Building a factory to create jobs for people in a developing country is a wonderful idea, for example, until those same people are forced to work fourteen-hour shifts for pennies to a dollar.
It is clear that as an artistic community, and as a society, we are incredibly behind on legislating and ensuring there are safety nets when it comes to AI. As I have said before, I am a strong believer that Ethical AI can exist as a tool for artists that rewards user and contributor, but this also can only happen if corporations that develop these tools and make them mainstream via the market do the right thing with their royalty structures, contracts, and vetting. If they won't do it on their own, then the law and even the talent unions must. In this, I admit I am an idealist. Deep down, I understand history is not on my side.
If we continue to encourage the use of open source, we create the overstory that plagiarism is acceptable, and there would be zero effort to create and cultivate Ethical AI. In my continuing artistic experiments, all I can do is continue to be transparent and continue to do the best I can in ensuring my due diligence. I refuse to believe that the overstory of AI cannot be changed and shaped to better serve and benefit the artistic community.
Call me an optimist.
I finished up dinner by downing a coconut flan. Intellectual conversations are ones I revel in, especially when fueled by a little bit of rum and capped off with sugar. As my sister and I headed towards her car in the cold, fall air, grateful for our time together and in agreement that we should do it more often, a waiter ran after us with my umbrella. Wonderful.
Now they think I was late and mindless.
