However …. I say ‘created’ by AI, but here is the rub, the AI at this stage of progress only ‘creates’ by searching for data that already exists on the internet and mashes it out into whatever it is that we have asked for.
Being less polite, it plunders, blogs, books, works of art, opinion etc without regard for Intellectual Property or other permissions that up until now have at least had tacit recognition, in order to respond to the enquirer.
I decided to run a narrow test. I asked an AI program to build me a scenario for my imaginations campaign in the knowledge that my imaginations setting is unique to me - i.e. the AI would not really have many places to go to draw on material.
In this instance, it clearly visited my blog and drew directly on one of my scenario posts and pretty much reformatted it, but replicated it under the guise of its own creation!
It didn’t produce a map, but then I didn’t have one on the blog post for it to take. So I asked for one. Within seconds it had produced a map. It had placed the various commands in their proper places (left, centre, right), so this data had obviously (and cleverly) been lifted from my text, but when it came to terrain, it placed down a bizarre looking double hedge from one side of the table to the other - unrecognisable to anything that I have played.
The first thing I noticed was the remarkable speed at which this was done, it was lightning fast.
The text reformatting was good and generally accurate to my original, in fact probably a better summary.
But where there is no data to draw from (i.e. the map) and it is left to guess, then its weaknesses really showed up. The AI is not clever (the software is) or creative of itself, what it does is done with remarkable technology, but it lives off the back of others, a concern when the internet abounds with misinformation and other problematic content.
In one of my imagination story lines, Margaret of Anjou (a real person in history) visited one of my imagined towns and was forced to flee to an imagined priory 25 miles away when Yorkist soldiers entered the town to search.
If a student etc was to ask AI a question for say, essay building, as to the life of Margaret of Anjou, would that essay end up including an incident of this Queen visiting a strange place in 1471 and having to flee to a priory and if that essay itself became data for other enquirers to draw upon, how long would it take for my little local story telling to become a widely told truth!
Anyway, until AI becomes more discerning and is able to actually create new ideas, we should be mindful that whatever is produced is essentially made on the back of another - everything has a price, including free internet!
