A mind of its own

re: "AI art raises questions about copyright" (BP, October 26, 2022)

Dear editor,

Whilst wondering how much of the text might have been prompted if not actually written by a helping AI, I enjoyed Saliltorn Thongmeensuk's timely reflections on the present need to set up legal frameworks for the ascending AI and its creative achievements. Google's omnipresent AI, I've noticed, has become far more adept over recent years at correctly predicting the word or groups of words that I would like to write next.

But Open AI's GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, Google's LaMDA, which recently convinced one of its creators that it was an actual person (Google insists it is not),  and the rest of the growing set of rapidly evolving deep learning and other AIs pose a far more enticing set of questions to ponder than the beguiling legal issues raised.

As Chula law lecture Dr. Saliltorn notes, "In short, AI is no longer a tool of humans, but it can make decisions and create artistic works itself." And this is perhaps where AI most pushes us to reflect on what, if anything, is particularly special, let alone unique, about being a typical adult human being.  

Dr. Saliltorn uses the adjective "rapid" to describe the evolution of AI, but this seems a bit weak. We took millions of years to mindlessly evolve by nature's blind trials into what we are today. AI began only decades ago, and being mindfully evolved by ourselves, is developing at an exponentially accelerating clip that makes it reckless to predict what it might be capable of in five more years, let alone another decade of ever accelerating evolution. 

These are indeed most interesting times to live in. 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on October 28, 2022, under the title "A mind of its own" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2424555/a-mind-of-its-own