Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain; The New York Times, September 10, 2024

 Dennis Duncan, The New York Times; Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain: 

Review of NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

"In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information...

The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.

The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves...

“When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”...

Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves."

Science Fiction Magazines Battle a Flood of Chatbot-Generated Stories; The New York Times, February 23, 2023

Michael Levenson , The New York Times; Science Fiction Magazines Battle a Flood of Chatbot-Generated Stories

"Elaborating on his concerns in the interview, Mr. Clarke said that chatbot-generated fiction could raise ethical and legal questions, if it ever passed literary muster. He said he did not want to pay “for the work the algorithm did” on stories generated by someone who had entered prompts into an algorithm.

“Who owns that, technically?” Mr. Clarke said. “Right now, we’re still in the early days of this technology, and there are a lot of unanswered questions.”"

Even in the digital age, Only human-made works are copyrightable in the U.S.; March 21, 2022

 K&L Gates LLP - Susan Kayser and Kristin Wells , Lexology; Even in the digital age, Only human-made works are copyrightable in the U.S. 

"The U.S. Copyright Office Review Board refused copyright protection of a two-dimensional artwork created by artificial intelligence, stating that “[c]urrently, ‘the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work,’” see recent letter. The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices does not explicitly address AI, but precedent, policy, and practice makes human authorship currently a prerequisite.

A “Creativity Machine,” authored the work titled “A Recent Entrance into Paradise.” The applicant, Steven Thaler, an advocate for AI IP rights, named himself as the copyright claimant. Thaler’s application included a unique transfer statement: “ownership of the machine,” and further explained that the work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” Thaler sought to register the work as a work-for-hire because he owns the Creativity Machine.

AI’s “kill switch” at the U.S. Copyright Office? AI isn’t human. The Review Board relied on the Office’s compendium of practices and Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1879—long before computers were a concept—to hold that the U.S. Copyright Office will not register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.

The Review Board also denied Thaler’s argument that the work made for hire doctrine allows non-human persons like companies to be authors of copyrighted material. The Board explained that works made for hire must be prepared by “an employee” or by “parties” who “expressly agree in a written instrument” that the work is for hire.

Because Thaler did not claim any human involvement in the work, the Board did not address under which circumstances human involvement in machine-created works might meet the statutory requirements for copyright protection. This is an issue that may soon arise."

Can An AI Algorithm Copyright What It Creates?; Forbes, August 2, 2017

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Can An AI Algorithm Copyright What It Creates?

"Today AI systems are still largely human guided, meaning that even creative algorithms like Google’s Deep Dream are still dependent on the input of a human artist to select both the training images to build the neural network and the image to manipulate. What happens, however, as deep learning algorithms become increasingly capable, eventually operating more and more without human oversight?

Imagine a future version of Deep Dream that is fully autonomous and sits by itself coming up with completely novel imagery that has never been seen by human eyes and which was not guided or suggested by any human. Who owns the rights to these images? If an art company uses such an algorithm to produce new works, can it copyright those works for itself or are the works entirely unprotectable? Or could the AI itself own those works and generate profit from them that it could use to improve itself?"