The AI big beasts are consuming whatever they will for their survival

Like prehistoric dinosaurs lumbering across the landscape, the AI big beasts are now all around us, consuming whatever they will for their survival.

But while Tyrannosaurus Rex devoured 22 stones of meat in a day (that’s a whole lot of duck-billed hadrosaurs), that kind of diet is small fry for a modern AI monster.

A model like ChatGPT is estimated to chomp through billions of data points per day to grow its knowledge and capability – that’s the equivalent of processing information from millions of web pages.

But what actually are “data points”? To you and me in the living, breathing world, they are investigations by journalists which may have taken weeks of work. They are interviews with politicians which have teased out an important truth. They are books written from a lifetime of thought and experience. They are poetry, and art, and music.

They are the things which make us human. And they are the things which generative AI models must feast upon to improve their pretence of being human.

The question of whether it is wise to hand over our humanity to robots is a ship long sailed. It’s happening whether we like it or not. And without doubt there will be many valuable benefits to the world from AI.

The question now has become whether those who create those data points should at least receive some recompense from the AI behemoths for selling our souls.

The past few weeks have seen news outlets, musicians, writers and others in the creative industries join forces to stand against a government plan to allow AI firms to take content without payment or permission – unless it has been explicitly denied in advance.

The creatives’ argument is that the complexity of denying permissions to untold numbers of AI businesses is unfeasible and not watertight. And why should they have to instruct others not to take the products of their labour without payment?

Do shopkeepers now need to hang signs in their stores explicitly informing customers it’s not OK to nick the bananas? Maybe they do. But Britain has had world-leading copyright laws since Dr Johnson was a baby, and as a result of writers and artists being properly paid for their work we have nurtured some of the greatest creative talents the world has ever known from The Beatles to Charles Dickens.

The business argument is that unless the UK allows AI firms to take what they need to train their models, they will direct investment to countries that will. Like America. Who gifted the world The Monkees and Dan Brown. Exactly.

Local and national news sites and newspapers carried a co-ordinated campaign on front pages and home pages yesterday, the final day of a public consultation into the plan.

More than 1,000 musicians including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn created a silent album to illustrate what the soundtrack of our lives could be if musicians are starved of earnings that are rightfully theirs and forced out of business. And broadcasters including the BBC, ITN, Sky and Channel 4 have also collectively argued against the proposals.

More than 48,000 creatives have signed a letter attacking the “major, unjust threat” to their livelihoods.

Some publishers have already begun legal action against AI outfits which have taken their content without asking or paying. Others have done deals with specific companies and are earning something from the deals. Most are uncertain which way to turn.

Since coming into office and focusing on growth, the new Government has shown much support (well, kind words, anyway) for a UK creative industry worth more than £125bn a year.

But it seems the investment baubles being dangled by AI firms have dazzled them, and they are now kowtowing to the glamour of the tech kids. Will they push through with the plans regardless of the noisy opposition?

Well, while there may be some public sympathy for the plight of musicians and artists who will lose out, public sympathy for journalists and publishers generally hovers around zero.

But hey, if I’d wanted to be popular, I’d have become a Redcoat at Butlins, not a red top journalist. And journalism in the UK does not need to be popular to be essential.

At a time when misinformation is awash both here and globally, there has never been such a need to protect the work of a regulated, responsible press. After years of big tech – in the form of Google and Facebook – using our news but taking the bulk of advertising revenues, the news industry is already severely challenged.

Having our content ripped from us for free by AI will be another enormous blow. And a withered press foreshadows a withered democracy.

After all, if journalists and news organisations are unable to fund investigation, interrogations and creativity in the way that they have, what will be left for the AI models to feed upon? The AI monsters will have run out of little hadrosaurs to tear apart and consume.

Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror from 2018-24; she won Columnist of the Year at the 2018 National Press Awards