A.I. Is Devouring Artists w/Ted Rall

Future shock? Who's got future shock? In this episode, we dig back into our Official Topic of 2023: the AI Revolution.

OpenAI just dropped a shiny new chatbot, GPT-4. This delighted tech journalists, who turned a product launch into lofty thinkpieces and listicles about all the things GPT-4 can do, from diagnosing illness and generating Madonna jokes to making it easier for everybody to sue everybody.

As AI continues its siege of the white-collar, we wondered what all this will mean for artists.

So, we turned to our friend — cartoonist, writer, and general troublemaker Ted Rall. Ted wrote a piece for WhoWhatWhy about how AI companies are building their extremely profitable tech on the backs of the millions of artists and writers whose work populates the internet. 

His story looks at a lawsuit brought by a trio of artists against some big AI companies. The artists contend that using their work as training data amounts to a kind of 21st-century theft.

Our conversation with Ted roams hither and yon: We talk copyright, collage, Google Books, a vacuum cleaner conspiracy, and lots of other issues facing artists and writers in the age of the all-devouring chatbot.

Is the Cartoonist Singularity nigh? Can Ted finally turn over the pen to the machines and get a bike ride in? Can we use a chatbot to write us a lawsuit to sue a chatbot?

Let us know what you think. Our chatbox is open: [e-mail]

JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates