AI – Imitation is the Most Insincere Form of Flattery
This summer, 2023, I’ve been thinking about AI – Artificial Intelligence. 2023 is AI’s Year Zero. Hence, this article attempts a response to AI by taking an informed view of the current issues and how these may impact us, including writers like me.
I use digital technology daily as a consumer and content creator. After all, the origins of this website date back 25 years. And who doesn’t use the Internet? However, I no longer use social media platforms. This is partly because of the declining quality of content, partly because of hate and conspiracy lies, and partly because they extract behavioural value from us for profit. As usual, it’s not the technology itself that’s harmful; it’s how it’s used (and abused).
In short, I’ve decided to use something other than AI on this website – me.
“Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.” 1.
Claim and Counter-claim
Proponents of AI, usually those with the most significant vested interests, claim that it’ll save the world from climate emergencies, diseases, poverty, and ourselves. In short, Utopia is, like always, just around the corner.
Others predict dystopian outcomes, where AI enslaves us all to robots, with the inevitable extinction of the human race. Maybe – but AI is NOT sentient; while AI now does well in the Imitation Game, it remains an inanimate parrot that wouldn’t pass the Dunning-Kruger incompetence test. If AI were to develop a mind with consciousness and thought, that would be genuinely scary.
In any case, all these claims are media smokescreens, a diversion from the actual impacts of AI that are already happening. Grandiose claims are different from the intended goals that Big Tech wants from developing and owning AI. The real Big Tech goals are the same as ever: the corporate extraction of wealth and power, held by the few. In other words, greed.
The State We’re In
Almost everything humans have published (including the content of this website) has now been “crawled” by bots. That enables search engines to do their work and the creation of vast machine-readable datasets. All these datasets are used to “train” AI machines, which must be repeated many times to “optimise” potential results. Additionally, even your data held in particular cloud services has probably been used, whether private or not, regardless of positive consent.
Technology models then manipulate this data with massive computing power, predictive algorithms, and neural networks. With language models, the machine composes text or speech answers to questions asked of it. It does this by making statistical predictions about the most likely word to occur next in the sentence under construction. The more training that is undertaken, the more the likelihood of generating a plausible result. It’s not necessarily accurate or truthful, but it is often convincing.
Similarly, this applies to other creative disciplines such as art, photography, performance, music and films. In short, enormous amounts of data are chewed up, stored, and spat out by computers in Big Tech server farms. We’re talking zettabytes worth of data: total annual internet traffic reached one zettabyte in 2015; this year, it will be 103 zettabytes.2.
Real Threats Now
AI also needs continent-sized amounts of electricity. Hardly eco-friendly. A recent study suggests that AI already uses 2.5% of the world’s electricity and the expected AI energy use is exponential. Some of this is renewable, but carbon offsets make any green claims highly suspect. As for the water use needed to keep data centres cool, that’s massive, too. And resource demand will grow as AI encroaches. New Nuclear power plants are being planned to power AI server farms3. We need to reduce our use of resources, not consume more! These are aspects on which Big Tech keeps silent.
Moreover, Big Tech needs to be more transparent about most other aspects of AI. While researching for this article, I saw that some “training data” fed into the Big Tech machines was even undertaken in the third world with exploitative conditions and low wages. And this work even takes place in refugee camps! Some workers have developed PTSD from the disturbing material used.
Imitation is the Most Insincere Form of Flattery.
The insatiable maw of AI has no moral compass. It doesn’t know the difference between “good” and “bad.” It demands (and produces) appalling graphic sexual violence, hate speech, deepfakes and abuse just as readily as it wilfully consumes the novels of Jane Austen and the plays of Shakespeare.
You might find it harmless fun to read a wine review that’s AI-written in the style of Stephen King. However, would you like to see what appears to be a family member as a victim of a horrific abuse video? Or being scammed out of your life savings using what sounds like the voice of a trusted friend or relative? “Deepfake” is already here, and AI is making it even harder to spot. How, then, will we distinguish truth from fiction?
AI is only as “effective” as the data it feeds on and can’t distinguish between truth and lies. With restricted data, it produces obvious errors and garbage, which Big Tech likes to call “hallucinations” to give you the impression that AI is somehow a living thing, and that we should forgive it and help it. Gubble, gubble, gubbish, as Philip K. Dick would say. Another example: Amazon sells books written entirely with AI – yet those AI-written books about Wild Mushrooms are so error-strewn that Fungi experts consider them lethal.
Datapanik in the Year Zero
Though only in infancy, AI offers unregulated, opaque, and unfettered mimicry. The data for “training” such programs is often obtained illegally. This is a flagrant breach of copyright and represents theft on a massive scale. For example, it was recently revealed that Stephen King’s novels had been stolen by AI without his consent, acknowledgement, or payment, alongside 183,000 other books.4. In the wine world, three Jancis Robinson books are included in that dataset – how do you feel about that HRH?
As is common in Big Tech, the attitude is “just do it and ask for forgiveness later.”
Your Replacement – a Toaster
Millions of jobs across every sector risk obsolescence. Previous automation replaced aspects of tedious and repetitive work. Now, AI threatens to replace decision-makers, critical thinking, and creative industries. These will become obsolete as it is cheaper to serve up simulacra without imagination rather than employ a human to make something new. Such content is sterile and hollow.
Meanwhile, search engines (Bing, Google), Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and even email incorporate AI, as do translation programs and grammar/spellcheckers. Apple are doing it, too, but at least you can turn it off. Our participation in AI is becoming ubiquitous. However, this is often without our knowledge, let alone consent.
Creatives, whether in writing, acting, music, art, or photography, need to stand together. They are coming for you. Now. And there’s more – AI imitation can easily pass written exams and write research papers – so in the future, what value are your qualifications? Or, indeed, your education?
Writing in General
Writing, whether exciting or dull, has, until recently, been an entirely human process. At best, it’s a mark of creativity and intelligence that distinguishes our species from the rest of the animal kingdom. So, what impact does AI have on authors and, by extension, their readers? There are authors, poets, and journalists at risk, sure. But it threatens an entire ecosystem of academics, illustrators, translators, and editors.
To quote The Society of Authors,5. “The UK government makes much of the £3.7 billion contribution that the AI industry made to the UK economy and the 50,000 people it employs. This is just 3% of the £115 billion value of the creative industries, which employ some 2.4 million people.” On that metric, Big Tech should not be calling the shots. However, another way of looking at it is that there’s plenty left for AI to gobble up. This is not growth that will benefit the UK.
Wine Writing
Wine writing is not exceptional; its limitations apply to the entire genre. Is it any significant cultural loss if generative AI and chatbots replace wine writers? Probably not. But that’s not the point. AI replaces my genuine, if time-consuming, human attempts at creativity and purpose. And with what? Machine text, whose advantage is that it’s quick, cheap, and even duller than I can make it on a good day 6. Soon, wine writers, educators, and even sommeliers will cease to exist.
Meanwhile, “member organisations” (regardless of speciality) that have not alerted their members to AI are doing them a grave disservice. Like the Dodo, they will soon become extinct because all their members will be.
Hence, I’m grateful that the Society of Authors (SoA) is a member organisation taking a clear and active stand on AI. It’s undertaking research and lobbying governments and big tech companies to implement effective international controls. These would protect jobs and incomes and enforce our existing legal copyright, creative, and privacy rights. Meanwhile, the SoA offers practical contractual advice to help authors protect their commercial interests.
This website will continue without AI and despite AI.7.But only because I do it for love. Try simulating that.
A Prediction
Someone, somewhere, will soon hack these existing AI models for their training data and algorithms, just as the Big Tech AI creators have hacked Humans. This will produce a new generation of AI at a very low relative cost. Spot the irony! Perhaps we will then wake up to realise that the Big Tech Emperors are not wearing any clothes after all. There again, perhaps not.
And Finally
Inevitably, the AI genie is out of the bottle, and there will be winners (a few billionaires) and losers (most of humanity). Inevitably, the impacts of AI will affect everyone across many aspects of our lives, whether intended or not. There is the potential for good outcomes, but only if action is taken to control its use.
As it stands, AI is the latest example of unregulated mass extraction of value by Big Tech for their sole profit. It is not free; it’s plagiarism, it’s theft. You and your creativity are the product. We serve it, yet it should serve us.
At one time, Google used the phrase “Don’t be evil” as its motto, including it in its IPO share-offer documents and Corporate code of conduct. It doesn’t use it anymore, so make of that fact what you will. However, I recall a famous phrase: all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
AI is plopware.
Notes
1. Spoken by HAL 9000, the rogue spacecraft computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
2. A Zettabyte is 1021 bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), or a billion Terabytes, or a trillion Gigabytes.
3. Remember the Three Mile Island Nuclear disaster? The surviving nuke reactor is being switched back on again to power Microsoft AI. Think Chernobyl, think Fukushima. Nuclear power is not green!
4. Check out this database on The Atlantic. Stephen King is just one of many published authors. However, as the “King of Horror,” it seems apt to mention him for this article.
5. Source: The Author, magazine of the Society of Authors, Summer 2023.
6. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, AI is for “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
7. The Wine Alchemy Policy Page stipulates no AI usage is allowed on this website. Specifically, GPTBot and CCBot have been barred from crawling the pages of this website because they scrape data for AI.
THE LATEST COLOSSAL AI THEFT – UPDATE 20 MARCH 2025
News agencies worldwide have reported that Alex Reisner of The Atlantic broke the story of Meta’s colossal theft of Copyright material. Meta is Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta has used this material to train their version of AI plopware called Llama3.
The headline says it all: The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem. Meta pirated 7.5 million books and 81 million papers in a data set called Library Genesis (LibGen). You can search this database online, and guess what? My copyright articles are in LibGen and so have been STOLEN by Meta.
To add insult to injury, staff at Meta discussed licensing books and papers lawfully, but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. You’ve got to feel sorry for Meta: their market capitalisation is only £1.147 TRILLION. Zuckerberg is the arch #Facecrook.
This is the response from the Society of Authors. As a member, I fully endorse this letter and its actions, including the SOA peaceful protest outside the Meta offices in London on 03/04/2025:
SOA Meta Protest London 03/04/25 Photograph © Melina Spanoudi
Placards at the protest included “Get the Zuck off our books” and “I’d write a better sign, but you’d just steal it”.