How is ‘artificial intelligence’ going for you?

YOUR UNION needs to know about your experiences of so-called "artificial intelligence". Have you tried using it to speed up your generation of words or images? Have you been asked to use it in your work? What happpened?

The National Union of Journalists has made its submission to a UK government consultation on a "code of practice" for "AI". This consultation follows the government backtracking - for the moment - on a plan to make it legal to "scrape" every word, image and sound posted online to feed the maw of "training" the systems whose designers generally call the more modest "machine learning".

The NUJ response - at bit.ly/NUJ-AI - notes that for systems to be "ethical and trustworthy... inherently includes respecting the rights of those whose content is used." It notes that "Journalism is relied upon by society to inform decision making and uphold democracy and the failure to label AI content as such is likely to exacerbate these concerns and erode public trust. All work produced by AI should always be labelled clearly as such."

In this it follows the statement issued by the International and European Federations of Journalists on the occasion of World Intellectual Property Day - see here.

The NUJ has also had input into much more technically detailed responses from two other bodies to which it belongs: the British Copyright Council and Creators' Rights Alliance.

The legal and lobbying story certainly doesn't end here, in the UK or elsewhere. So do email ai@londonfreelance.org with your experiences - and see our recent coverage at www.londonfreelance.org/ai

First ChatGPT defamation lawsuit falls

Lawyers for the Australian mayor who threatened proceedings against ChatGPT for making up a libellous biography for him (see last issue) told journalist Ashley Bellanger that "no further legal steps are being taken in this case at this time after OpenAI removed the defamatory information and 'corrected the public record'." The Freelance is not clear that it is possible to remove such a thing from a Large Language Model. More work required...

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'Artificial Intelligence' our coverage to date