Much is made of the derivative nature of A.I. And while A.I. is indeed derivative at its core, I’m not sure I agree that lack of originality is its most damning issue.

Computers are constantly getting progressively better at experimenting and finding creative new combinations. Creativity is a process, it is not magic, and you could argue that there is very little true originality anyway – almost all forms of expression build on that which came before. That holds true even for human evolution itself.

No, the truly horrific prospect I worry about is IF and WHEN computers manage to match human ingenuity in combining old things into new ones. If that happens, we have outsourced what is a very core part of humanity, and where does that leave us? Even if computers COULD create original works, why on Earth would we want them to?! Are we really, as a species, looking to remove and replace human thought and creativity…? The very notion is antithetical to human existence.

Users and endorsers of A.I. are betraying some very core humanist principles, and they’re doing so seemingly cluelessly in terms of the consequences. Those of us who work in the creative application of technology (which includes myself) have a responsibility to step up and draw a line for what is acceptable, and what is not. I create graphic design and design systems for machine learning, but that is MY work that is fed to the machine, to determine which creative combinations are the most productive – not anyone elses work. I think the unapproved, unacknowledged appropriation of anyone’s work – ANY work – needs to be outlawed, and more than that, I think that ought to be a completely foregone conclusion.

I’m especially disturbed by the unsettling combination of greed and completely uncritical adoption of technology, where nobody seems to reflect on the consequences. This seems to me a uniquely American phenomenon.

I’ve heard vapid American capitalists justify this destructive “disruption” (in fact, almost any disruption of almost any market) in the most crass way possible, inferring that something is right just because it makes money. This amounts to a form of nihilism at best, or economic fascism at worst.

Furthermore, I have heard vapid American technologists justify the wholesale plundering or our cultural heritage that A.I. enables, simply because it represents a technological advancement – as if humanity is already of secondary importance to computers.

Both these positions are as baffling as they are horrifying.

Some speak out (well-intentionally) against A.I. in defense of the human creative process, attributing almost magical powers to the latter. I am more than a little leery of suggesting there is “magic” involved in the creative process, even though it often involves powers and influences unseen. But just because something is subjective and subconscious does not make it magical.

This is in fact one of the very core problems with A.I.: that its influences and sources are unknown, which gives tech evangelists the liberty to imply the occurrence of “magic” (though of a different kind). The human brain processes only that which we have fed to it, and that which we have been fed at conception, through DNA. All of this is dangerously analogous to A.I. We get into very murky waters if we sanction ideas on the sole basis of the inspiration for those ideas being unknown to us.

If anything, we need to insist on more transparency, and not endorse the obscuring of references. Such obfuscation enables theft. As humans, we are the sum total of our experiences, and this is in fact equally true of A.I. – the difference is how far A.I. is able to interpolate and morph those experiences. This currently has its limits, but that will surely evolve, and the only way to escape this slippery slope is to make an absolute, unequivocal demand for transparency. We cannot argue theft if we cannot prove what was stolen.

So, I’m using the ”magic” analogy as a word of caution here, because when we’re talking tech that is this complex, some will (and do!) find it indistinguishable from magic. What we call it matters, and we need this process to be seen for what it really is, with full transparency and zero romanticization: industrialized theft, and super-charged pillaging.

The further we let this progress, the more difficult it will be to show how it is done, and to demonstrate that zero magic is involved. We are now, in fact, in urgent need of what the illusionist Houdini did to spiritualism in the early 1900s:

A.I. is not a boon to humanity, and it’s false sheen of magic needs to be debunked.