There has been a great increase in regular GAI coverage  from usual press sources, as the press has identified the popular appetite for some of the foibles of GAI and also some of its likely short-term and long-term social and educational impacts.

I was interested to see that universities and secondary schools are relenting on the ban of the use of GAI in academic endeavors.  Such was inevitable, as the power of AI to suggest ideas and to help organize is irresistible.  The use of this tool, as well as the use of  other electronic information  sources, can be educational and mind-widening, and the focus has to move towards how best to use and not use the tool– something like trust but verify.

Less sanguine has been the general US government’s apathy in regulating the industry itself, and particularly regulating the data sets included in the vast data pools which feed GAI output.  Europe remains far ahead of us.  The US tendency to be slow in regulating new science, lest regulation quash the development of that science for the greater good, is being repeated here; and the Executive branch and Congress are so deeply immersed in the problems and politics of the day that the topic of AI does not often rise to the level of public consideration.  (Not a lot of political discussion in the upcoming election addresses GAI either from the artistic or economic standpoints.  How many candidates have you heard address this?  The warning siren of societal crises in employment and world peace having been raised, it seems that those aspects of the dialog have been replaced by newer crises-de-jour.)

As a member of the board of the New England Poetry Club and the author of five volumes of poetry, I was also struck by a couple of articles assuring us that GAI will never create great poetry because GAI output is always derivative and lacks the perception and depth of the human soul.  While I would love to believe that conclusion, there are some problems: readers sometimes fall in love with the flow of words and it is hard to feel the soul of the poet in many instances; “copying/adapting” publicly available poetry in AI-generated works is in a way copying the “soul” of the poets who originally created the poetic data base, and some of the emotional intelligence gets blended into the AI recap of prior works; alas, many current poets (self included) may write passable poetry but not great poetry and some of us may well lack sufficient soul to infuse our sometimes mundane poetic lines.

I will henceforth try to concentrate on legal issues relating to GAI, as those developments tend not to be properly covered in the popular press.  However and as you know, I am personally fascinated by the wider issues of societal impact and thus you will occasionally find me straying from my legal focus; when that happens, you have my leave to stop reading if you do not share my verve for the “big issues.”