You Can Stop Worrying About AI!

I admit that I used to be worried that AI was going to take over the world.

After all,  we regularly hear about how AI is going to put lawyers and doctors out of business because it can access data more quickly and thoroughly than overworked interns or associates.  And teachers are at risk because kids can just ask ChatGPT things.  And we won’t need musicians because AI writes better music.  Or poets and writers for the same reason.

This scenario is what contributes to the fear about what we have unleashed.

But today I saw something in the news that made me think that it’s all going to work out all right.  Ed Sheeran was quoted as saying that if he loses his copyright infringement case, he is going to quit music. 

And just how will that save the world?

If things continue at the current pace, AI will be producing more and more music (and movies and books).  And given the speed at which computers can do things compared to humans, they will probably replicate the same notes and tempo and lyrics more quickly and often than humans do, i.e., plagarize.

It will take even less time for some legal bot to detect the copy job.  The result will be a lawsuit.  AI will be suing itself!

But since humans will have lost the ability to pull the plug on AI, the AI musicians won’t stop writing and infringing.  And the legal bots won’t stop bringing lawsuits.  AI will be suing itself and the psychology bots will detect the resulting emotional trauma (or in the case of AI, data dissynchronization) and attempt a therapeutic intervention.

The end result is that the whole AI apparatus will become so inwardly focused doing pointless counterproductive things that the system will melt down and we can go back to listening to human music and reading human books.

Whether the human race learns any lessons about AI (or pointless and counterproductive things) is another question.