Can AI have a positive impact on creative industries? This author thinks so

TECHNOLOGY
AI Ink: Writing, Publishing, and Misinformation at the Dawn of the AI Age
Jason Van Tatenhove
Skyhorse Publishing, $49.99

In the summer of 2022, a congressional committee in Washington sat to investigate the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Jason Van Tatenhove testified voluntarily about the two years he worked as national media director for the far-right paramilitary group: the Oath Keepers.

The American journalist-author elaborated on this topic in Perils of Extremism, which was published in 2023. That summer, Van Tatenhove’s wife, Shilo, died from a long-term medical condition. Afterwards, Van Tatenhove fell into a depression. He lost the mother of his two daughters, the love of his life, and an editorial advisor. In desperation, he asked ChatGPT to edit an article.

“I gave myself permission to cheat,” Van Tatenhove confesses in AI Ink, which is partially written by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The author claims AI tools like Grammarly, Jasper AI, and ChatGPT have made him a better writer. But he is transparent about AI sources, which are documented via a footnoting system he’s invented called The Colorado-Asimov Ethical Citation Standard (CA-ECS).

The title draws inspiration from I, Robot: a collection of short stories published by Russian American author, Isaac Asimov, in 1950, who imagined a society where robots worked alongside humans.

The same decade that Asimov’s collection of science fiction stories was published marked the birth of AI in the real world. Van Tatenhove starts with that history, which began with perceptrons.

Developed by the American psychologist Frank Rosenblatt, these primitive digital neurons mimicked how the human brain processes information. By the 1970s and ’80s, AI systems still struggled with complexity. The arrival of the backpropagation algorithm gave neural networks the ability to learn from mistakes.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, machine learning helped computers learn from data.

A decade later, deep learning enabled AI to carry out image recognition, speech processing, and language translation. In 2017, scientists working at Google published “Attention Is All You Need”, a paper that introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer. Based on attention mechanism, this became the foundation for the technology powering ChatGPT, BERT, and other AI systems that have transformed our digital landscape.

But as AI’s intelligence capabilities have grown, so too have ethical concerns.

Van Tatenhove points to numerous examples. AI systems have been developed from millions of books, mostly without any copyrighting. ChatGPT might have democratised AI access, but it’s also opened the floodgates to online abuse: spam, scams, fake news, and deepfakes.

Meanwhile, many AI specialists in Silicon Valley point to greater dangers. In May 2023, British-Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton walked away from Google, after warning that AI systems might soon surpass human intelligence. That March, the American computer scientist and researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky published an article in Time, titled Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down.

Van Tatenhove disagrees. “This presumes that any intelligence greater than ours will be indifferent or hostile,” he writes. This sets the tone for the rest of the book, where Van Tatenhove writes about the benefits AI is bringing to writers and journalists. Namely: automating mundane routine tasks, like transcription and data sorting. True. But outsourcing brainstorming, editing and writing to AI, as Van Tatenhove suggests?

It’s dangerous and irresponsible. When AI gets confused or doesn’t know a fact, it typically “hallucinates” and tells lies instead. Elsewhere, Van Tatenhove claims AI can help combat climate change and improve human rights across the planet.

Other authors tell another story. In The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024), Petra Molnar chronicled how AI-driven technology is used to punish refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless people at some of the world’s most dangerous border crossings.

Darren Byler’s In the Camps (2021) documented how China, under Xi Jinping, has employed pernicious sophisticated AI-led technological systems to separate Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities from the broader Han population.

“As we sit on the edge of this AI revolution, let’s not lose hope,” Van Tatenhove writes. “Let’s take these tools and learn to wield them for good. We must hold the tech industry accountable for building AI systems that align with our values.”

It’s not a convincing argument. It also assumes that AI systems are politically neutral.

The harsher truth is that the future of AI will not be determined by a collective democratic process, but behind closed doors in a Silicon Valley boardroom, by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Believing that anything but profit will influence their decisions is naive and hopelessly idealistic. “The future of AI isn’t just about technology,” Van Tatenhove concludes. “It’s about humanity.”

Indeed. But for a small portion of humanity. With AI’s assistance, they’ll own more resources, gross inequality will increase exponentially, as AI continues to promote the illusion of freedom.

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