Are There Any Ethical Guidelines in AI?
Perhaps they're all criminals?
I’m going to walk back my support for Perplexity.ai in light of recent events. While I had been an enthusiastic booster several times in this newsletter, I’ve come to the conclusion that their product is less than honorable. In a pattern that looks like ‘It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission’, many of the AI companies seem to think that the entire internet is theirs for the taking. In recent weeks we’ve learned that Adobe and Meta are ‘studying’ our personal images and OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati “isn’t sure” where the training data came from to train the Sora model. Add to that the lawsuits from the New York Times and Getty Images and the ‘deals’ made by Reddit and the Atlantic and I’m starting to feel like these companies will stop at nothing to get more data, to train their models, to gain an advantage in the AI arms race, or just prop up their market capitalization.
Perplexity is now under fire for basically scraping the queried data from existing sites, barely acknowledging were this info came from, and drastically reducing traffic to the original source.
The company appears to be ignoring a widely accepted web standard, the Robots Exclusion Protocol, to scrape parts of the web that operators don’t want to be accessed by bots, according to a report from developer Robb Knight this week that was confirmed by Wired.
Read more on Futurism or Gizmodo
And while many articles speculated that Perplexity was going after Google’s core search business, Google is now guilty of the same thing with it’s SGE or ‘Search generative Experience’, that takes existing sites out of the picture and threatens to break the internet.
I guess that this is my day for mea culpas, because I just read that Suno AI, a music generating tool I’m currently using for a project, is being sued (along with Udio AI) for copyright infringement.
A group of record labels including the big three — Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records — are suing two of the top names in generative AI music making, alleging the companies violated their copyright “en masse.”
To be blunt, it looks like these companies’ goose is cooked. They might have hoped that they could take a page from OpenAI’s playbook, using evasive language and misdirection to stall their less deep-pocketed critics, like authors and journalists. (If by the time AI companies’ skulduggery is revealed and they’re the only option for distribution, it no longer matters.) Techcrunch
If you’re not feeling discouraged yet, you should get your daily dose of reality/snark from Scott Galloway. In his most recent column, good old Prof G. discusses the term ‘AI washing’ as more and more companies are using it in their marketing materials to rise to historic valuations, despite not actually having any AI or any AI-derived value yet. Check it out
Feeling stuck and don’t know where to turn? Remember, Anthropic’s Claude has an ethical charter and the recent news about their model suggests it’s best in class
On To The Fun Stuff
Hot-tipper Sarita S. forwards this gem for the UX designers. 11 Game-Changing AI Trends for 2024. This list makes a lot of sense and I think you should check it out.
Christie C. always has excellent Midjourney articles and this one is a deep dive into style references —sref and character references —cref. So if you’re just getting started with Midjourney, I think you should check it out.
Sometimes the best web design is no web design. Need to get a basic site up in a hurry? Notion, the super productivity tool, just announced Notion Sites.
How bad is the first ‘brand story’ made for Toys ‘R’ Us with Sora? The one that premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity? Perhaps blame the Emmy nominated creative agency Native Foreign who made it, not Sora. Read about it or just view it on the Toys ‘R’ Us Website.
The PR also doesn’t try to claim it’s entirely generated by AI. Native Foreign, the creative agency that produced the footage, had “about a dozen people” working on the video and applied “corrective VFX” on top, according to director Nik Kleverov. Sora “got us about 80-85% of the way there,” Read more
On a more positive note, if you work in marketing or advertising and you’d like to see how companies like Klarna and Mars are using AI, you should read this article.
It has great real world examples of actual workflows, goals and metrics.
If you’re an illustrator, or some kind of image maker, and you’re looking for some way to get onboard the AI image train without loosing your soul, you might want to check out exactly.ai, as it let’s you train a model with your own images and produce more of your own work. Obviously, your mileage may vary, and it seems a little pricey, but you should go check it out.
It’s Tuesday June 25, and RunwayML’s promised Gen3 Alpha upgrade is nowhere to be found, so I’m forging a head with Pixverse.ai in my attempts to enter an AI generated film competition about Bigfoot. I’m really happy with this tool and you can read a longer writeup about my process here on this Medium post. Or, you can just watch the video, below.
That’s it for this week! I’m having an amazing summer, learning lots of new skills, and getting outside whenever I can. As always, if you’d like me to do a research deep dive on something AI/Design related, just say the word!