If you are a sentient human, you probably recognize the headline of this post as the set-up for a million jokes and puns. (If you are not a sentient human: welcome to the chat!) The linked article, from the BBC, follows efforts to have an AI generate jokes worthy of a stand-up comedian's live performance. Along the way, the article gives a great overview of how common AI tools work today and how they can present legal problems for people who use them (or who depend upon their output). It's also just an interesting read.
WHY IT MATTERS
AI is the "next big thing" in technology and is being used already in settings as diverse as ordering a burger at a drive-through to making coverage decisions for health insurance purposes. AI cannot exhibit judgment yet; it is essentially an odds-maker. The better its source materials (and algorithms), the better the odds it will produce good output. But the source material may be faulty, leading to bad outcomes; or it may belong to a third party, meaning the AI provider or user could be inadvertently stealing someone's IP. For any small business owner considering using AI in the enterprise setting, these questions are all part of the diligence that should accompany any purchasing decisions, as well as implementation plans inside the company (who can use the tool, and for what).
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work by processing billions of lines of text scraped from the internet and other sources... Using that data, AI generates responses that are, statistically, the most likely answer to a given prompt. That means these AI tools can only replicate information that already exists in some form, though it can result in never-before-seen combinations of ideas.... You might assume comedians have little to worry about if AI is so fundamentally derivative, but there are major secondary risks for creatives. "Comedians should be concerned about data theft and regurgitation, because many of the generative AI tools, especially ChatGPT, are being trained on content on the internet," Powell says. "This means people's writing and creativity are acquired from the internet without permission."
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