AI at Work: Bubbles in the sand Part III

Nuances of copyright, plagiarism, accuracy and critical thought

Photo by Rock Vincent Guitard via Unsplash

Welcome to Part III of the AI at Work series here on The Muse. Part I started off innocuously enough, walking us through a variety of work-relevant applications of generative AI and highlighted the four primary ways they’re helping professionals in the workforce.

Having secured our trust (and confirmed our naiveté), Part II dragged us through the mire of the rancid underbelly of gen AI. If you joined us on that daring adventure and survived, congratulations. You are now a wiser, humbler, and more critically thinking if not desperately more nauseated human. If you missed it and enjoy doom-reading or need to prove your humanly prowess to your significant other, please walk on through this door. Do bring your spear.

Here in Part III, we follow the White AI Dragon into a land of uncertainty and shifting realities. A land where all that you had known and relied upon as a creator, thinker, or maker of things, such as copyright law, intellectual property protections, the concept of authorship, and the foundational elements of accuracy and reliability, shift along fresh fault lines drawn by heartless algorithms. A land whose peace-loving, nature-aligned natives have not been prepared for the ruthless colonizing onslaught now being visited upon them by technology so new they shake in terror and awe and consider it their own myths and prophecies incarnated.

This series lives behind the paywall, so I can feed the insatiable data dragons. But if financial constraints make it challenging for you to upgrade, drop me a line and we’ll work it out—especially if your profession is being impacted by generative AI.

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Climate change is not enough. Threats to democracy are not enough. A global pandemic is not enough. Another war in Europe (and all the others around the world) is (are) not enough. A mental health crisis among our youth is not enough. Because we apparently have way too much free time on our hands, and our lives are far too comfortable and convenient for our own good, we also need another existential crisis: the (another?) AI revolution.

I’ve also had more than enough of the “unless you’ve had your head stuck in the sand the past few years, [fill in latest amazing insight no one else is writing about]” cliché intros to articles. But the AI dragons do burrow through the sand, so ironically, the best way to get to know them and how they work is precisely to stick your head in the dunes. Ready?