Advancements in natural language processing models, like ChatGPT, have made it possible to efficiently synthesis and compose knowledge available in the public domain. We no longer need to search, stack rank, select and extract key pieces of information.
This comes at a cost. These models learn from large pools of data accessible on the public internet. Being able to generate insights from facts dynamically - means the original source of truth becomes irrelevant. You might ask yourself… How can I be sure the data sources these models are learn from are accurate? Simple, like other democratic systems… the majority wins. If the majority say that the earth is flat, these models will tend to treat that as a fact. Once AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is solved, this will be a different case…
We are in an era now, where we have to answer the hard questions. The biggest one, in the new world of generative AI is - who owns the rights to material produced by these models? There is an argument to be made by both sides. However, in my opinion - work inspired by others is not collectively owned by others. For example, if I learn a song and I make another song based on the same ideas of the song that I just learned - it still is my song… it was just inspired by another song. If I plagiarize that song, word for word and present it as my own… then this becomes another story. Artists borrow ideas and tunes from others all the time. Ethically I’m not saying this is right, but this is encoded in our biology. We learn from others experiences, we teach to ensure the next generation is able to survive.
What does this mean for content creators of the future? Well… until artificial general intelligence becomes reality… we are going to continue to reward original content. Ideas and creations that have never been seen before will thrive in this modern era. Derivative content will be lost amongst the rest and filtered out by algorithms. Humans will get bored off derivative content on media platforms will start to seek original content. An AI may have helped generate surrounding themes of the original idea, but the idea itself would have come from an irrational entity. And like I said… once AGI is built, this is no longer relevant.