AI does not have a right to exist

It starts with an email I receive from Campaign Sunday Supplement, Campaign being the newspaper of the UK advertising industry. Digital only now of course, and not a publication I subscribe to anymore, being over 50 years of age and a copywriter of some 27 years standing (spent mostly sitting), both of which make me a dinosaur in the eyes of that most ageist of industries. And who needs human writers (or art directors, or illustrators or designers these days anyway when we have a much cheaper solution). And so begins the rant.

The email in question contains little teasers to articles that only subscribers can read in full. One peaked my interest and stirred my discontent that morning like a spoon in salty porridge. It featured the skeleton of a dinosaur along with the headline: Revealed: the agencies pulling back from fossil fuel clients.

This had me LOL-ing around my bed at the barefaced cheek of these agencies. As a firm believer that AI has no place in the creative industres whatsoever, it got me wondering how many of these oh-so environmentally-conscious agencies are happy seeing nuclear power stations recommissioned and demand for coal and gas power grow like never before just so they can use AI and avoid paying human creatives?

Let me make it clear, I didn’t read the article, I’m not a subscriber, so I’ve not seen the list of agencies therein. But I bet there’s a fair few who’ve jumped on the AI gravy train while still claiming to be ethical and concerned about the environment in the About Us section of their various websites.

The double standards are staggering. The message they seem to be saying is we won’t work with clients with any connection to fossil fuel usage, but we’re quite content to brush under the carpet the fact that we’re happy to boil a few lakes using AI if it means we can cut our payroll costs.

Shouldn’t clients be pulling back from these fossil fuel guzzling agencies what with all the evidence that’s emerging of the environmental damage that using Chat GPT (Generic Pilfered Trash?), Midjourney et al apparently causes?

Many ad agencies seem all-in on AI, so much so that a senior representative of one such global agency network happily added their name to a quite frankly pathetic open letter published in various places including the FT recently, a letter which reads like the biggest FOMO boo-hoo toys out the pram message ever committed to paper.

It’s a very carefully worded missive I must say, with genuine LOL bits like ‘we are working to serve hundreds of millions of Europeans.’  Yeah, serve them with their notice. There’s no mention of how AI is destined to cost millions of Europeans their jobs. No mention either of AI’s impact on the environment. But hey, Europe, what’s more important than all of that nonsense is that we can’t afford to fall behind the rest of the world.

My understanding of the letter’s content is that the senior leaders behind it are saying something along the lines of, look, governments of Europe, we’re big business leaders, important people, and we’ve found a toy that’s making us a shedload of money because it enables us replace humans with machines that don’t need paying, don’t take holidays, and don’t need regular breaks during the day. 

Trouble is, there’a an incey-wincey problem with this machine: it only works if we can steal human-created, copyrighted content from the internet. Please can you overlook this theft we’re actively involved with and not make us follow the law, so we can continue to line our pockets and pretend we are doing this for the good of the people of this wonderful continent?

Surely, any toy that relies on committing a crime to make it work should not be available to anyone. It should at the very least be redesigned, but ideally crushed underfoot or hidden in the high reaches of a cupboard so that greedy people who are obsessed with the money it will make them can’t get their hands on it. 

Of course, this is not going to happen, but neither should the attempts by the few fat cats who stand to benefit most from AI to change the law or completely ignore it go unnoticed. These people in positions of power are blinded by the huge dollar signs the letters A and I are causing to appear before their eyes, so much so they are taking to the pages of publications to effectively lobby governments to turn a blind eye to the fact this tech they’re inflicting on the world – tech that’s saving them money on the biggest drain on their business, the payroll - relies on plagiarism.

Changing the law on copyright so that these machine and money obsessed individuals can create their human replacement tech and boost their profits is a dangerous precedent. The law should be enforced and Ai that doesn’t abide by it dismantled.

That’ll do little old me for now. No solutions on offer here, other than I think it would be only right for any business that’s ‘all-in on AI’ to remove claims that they are an ethical, environmentally focused operation from their websites. 

And perhaps genuinely ethical and environmentally focused clients should take a closer look at their agencies.