PANDORA’S BOX HAS BEEN OPEN FOR TOO LONG
Last year, NLB rolled out programmes such as StoryGen, which uses Gen AI to create new variations of fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, as well as workshops like Children Write: Publish A Book With Gen-AI.
The writers’ petition raised four major concerns: The ethical issues of intellectual property misuse, as many AI models are trained on copyrighted materials without permission; the psychological impact, as reliance on AI undermines the development of writing skills and creativity; the risk to literary quality, since AI-generated works tend toward mediocrity and lack originality; and the significant environmental cost of AI, including its energy and resource-intensive nature, which contradicts NLB’s sustainability values.
Now, I must tell you that I did not write the paragraph above.
I fed the petition letter into ChatGPT and prompted it to “do a one-paragraph summary of the four concerns”. The chatbot spat out the information in two seconds.
Am I less of a professional writer for doing this? Can I put my name to this article if parts of it were not actually by me? And could you even tell?
This is what the local writers want NLB to warn the public about – that Gen AI is too easily used to substitute human effort. I agree with the writers’ concerns, but Pandora’s box has been open for too long.
The two-year-old ChatGPT is now the 9th most popular website in the world, and had 3.7 billion visits in October 2024, according to online tracker Similarweb. Gen AI is integrated into your Android phone or iPhone. A recent Google-Ipsos survey across 21 countries found that 80 per cent of Gen AI users use it for communications and writing.
Using Gen AI is now the norm, not the exception. The petition is well-intentioned, but it is hard to convince people to pull back on using Gen AI (especially when it is free).
If there is any public message to send now, it is that we humans must choose whether we want to be augmented or automated by Gen AI.
