Welcome to the end of the week. This week OpenAI was seriously looking into porn, the uncanny valley creeped us out, and Meta wasted millions to make us feel cooler. Even though it was five days, it feels like it’s been a year.
AI Regulation Can’t Come Soon Enough for Sheryl Crow
Every day is a winding road but it could be even more winding if AI starts messing with art. That’s what songwriter and singer Sheryl Crow is saying in her new guest column in The Hollywood Reporter. She writes:
I am not a scientist. I am an artist. I cannot begin to spout scientific data on what we will become once artificial intelligence outsmarts us. I can read the predictions of how our workforce will be replaced by AI. I can read the warnings from Stephen Hawking that go back as far as 1996 that it will not be climate change that will be our undoing but more likely, AI.
But what I can say with certainty is that what we all share as humans all over the planet and what connects us is the human experience made up of emotions that nothing programmed can ever experience. And it is what has documented our existence since the beginning of time in our hieroglyphics, and our paintings and our storytelling, and in our songs.
Crow’s latest album, Evolution, is about the threat and promise of AI in art, something that everyone from singers to rappers to visual artists are all facing as we enter this weird century.
Crow believes that safeguards are vital and is hoping that governments around the world will start enabling them:
Yes, I can feel heartened to see that artists in the visual medium have very recently accomplished creating safeguards around protecting their likenesses in film and television. And yes, I do believe our voices and likenesses need to be protected from bad actors using AI to make monetary gains for themselves. But, it is not the money or loss of compensation that I worry about. Yes, it is wrong to manipulate any artist’s likeness, voice, words or art as their own but for me, it is the deception we are giving our approval to by not doing something to keep it from happening.
Crow is referring the the deal the actors union, SAG-AFTRA, made with major studios as a resolution to last year’s strike in Hollywood. Parts of that agreement dealt with actors being compensated if their likeness was used in AI-created content as well as for work lost to AI performers that real actors could do.
SAG-AFTRA Executive Vice President Linda Powell spoke at an AI Symposium in New York this week, mirroring much of Crow’s concerns. However, Powell is a realist, understanding that no one can turn back the tide on technology and that creatives will need to figure out ways to keep the integrity of their art in a world with AI. We couldn’t agree more.
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OpenAI Is Taking On Google
According to Reuters, OpenAI is planning to announce a new search product on Monday, just in time to steal Google’s thunder at its I/O conference, which starts Tuesday. Details are sparse, but it appears that the product will be a direct competitor to Google search and another service, Perplexity, that made waves with a recent $63 million funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.
Hopefully we’ll see how the search tool deals with news stories Monday. We wrote about what that tool will probably look like last week, and how OpenAI thinks about publishers’ content (check it out here). Those observations were confirmed this week by AdWeek.
But if any publisher thinks this will be a relevant source of traffic, they’re dreaming. We’ll reserve final judgment until We’ve seen the UX, but the whole point of generative search is to obviate the need to click through to anything. Unless you’re doing serious research (the use case Perplexity seems to be going for), the summary is what you’re looking for — “just tell me the answer.”
This, of course, is why OpenAI has been doing deals with publishers. If your product negates their lifeblood — traffic — you pose an existential threat, which is of course why some publishers like The New York Times and newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI. Given the tricky legal situation, it seems clear that the only news links that will show up in OpenAI’s search product will be those of publishers that have a deal in place. While we’ve heard about many of those deals, it’s actually a very small percentage of news sites right now.
The question then is: Will ChatGPT Search get enough users that publishers will have to pay attention? If Business Insider’s version of a story (one of OpenAI’s publisher partners, through Axel Springer) becomes the definitive one in that part of the internet, does that have weight? Will this feature naturally grow, perhaps even challenging the dominance of Google News? Will Google then have to start cutting deals with publishers for generative search?
So much is unclear right now, but on Monday we may start to get some clarity on how users will get news in an AI-mediated world.
Bumble Founder Sees a Time When Our AIs Will Date Each Other
Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd spoke to Bloomberg about the future of AI. The whole interview is here but this is a particularly interesting snippet via Twitter user Tsarnick:
“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge. You could share your insecurities,” Wolfe Herd said. “There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.”
Basically, Herd wants our AIs to date each other in an effort to find exactly he right match or matches in a particular area. Whether or not this would work is one thing but this dystopian dating vision is giving some folks the creeps.
“At this point being happily married must feel like having had the morning off from your job at the Twin Towers on 9/11,” wrote Ben Sixsmith on Twitter.
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