Paul Murphy: Stop Big Tech's AI Theft

Thanks a lot to Sinn Féin for bringing the motion, for IMRO, for the campaigning on this issue and for the artists that have spoken out and highlighted it, because I think it's high time that this government, which has gulped down big tech's Kool-Aid, which has regurgitated it for the public in an unthinking way, is forced to reflect about the downsides of AI, which are very, very many, not just for artists and the creatives in our society, but our society as a whole. I don't think anyone wants a world where the majority of the internet and the majority of even supposedly creative content is AI slop. But that's the future that we're heading towards. That's a future unless we collectively call stop and pull the brake on generative AI. It's not an unstoppable train, even now. In the AI committee we've been treated to person after person telling us this is unstoppable. I mean, lots of people actually have correctly said no, this is not unstoppable, right? But the big tech line is this is unstoppable, you have to get on this train or else you're going to lose out. That's a narrative of inevitability, deliberately created and propagated by the big tech companies who profit from AI, who want to profit from AI in the future, who are currently gambling billions on it. And they are in it up to their necks right now. And they want to put us all in the same situation so that it becomes impossible for us to turn back. They want to hook us on generative AI like they've hooked us on social media and then start charging us through the nose for it, whether that's through user fees, advertising or selling our personal data to the highest bidder. There is an immense hypocrisy here. I'm old enough to remember those ads that started with you wouldn't steal a car. I went and watched the ad back there and it says you wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a television, you wouldn't steal a DVD, but downloading pirated films is stealing. And it finishes with piracy, it's a crime. I remember what came after that, which was a furore around Napster, Limewire, Pirate Bay. Ordinary people who downloaded an album or a video were demonised as pirates and threatened with court cases, fines and even prison sentences. Even today ordinary people can be criminalised if they download material illegally as opposed to using legal streaming services. Legal streaming services are epitomised by Spotify whose whole business model is based on ripping off artists financially, which it is, and now through generative AI ripping off and copying their music and turning it into AI slop as well. So now we have a situation that big tech have effectively pirated pretty much the entire creative output of humanity. What's the official output? What's the official response? Are the big tech bosses being rounded up? Are they being arrested? Are they being told you wouldn't steal a car, given that they've stolen effectively all of the music that has ever been created, ever? Talk about one rule for us and another for those at the top. Instead, we don't get that, we don't get any arrests, we don't get kicking down the doors of the big tech companies. Instead we get world leaders and our own Taoiseach rabbiting on about a fourth industrial revolution that will change everything, that this is equivalent, as important as the printing press. We need to recognise this as the pure corporate propaganda that it is and start asking who benefits from it. It's certainly not artists, it's certainly not musicians and it won't benefit people generally either. This motion is right to warn that generative AI may lead to a decline in the quality of human cultural and creative production. The truth is that's already happening. The tech industry wants us to outsource our brains to AI to let it do our thinking, our writing, our creating for us. It sounds to me like a very dystopian future that we should be doing everything in our power to avoid. I think something in it gets to the heart of the anti-humanist philosophy that many of these big tech leaders spout. There was one recently talking about, when confronted with the cost of training AI, they said well look, humanity, it costs all this, look at all the food you have to feed a baby, look at all the energy you have to commit to a baby to raise a human. Sure, a human takes more energy than AI to develop. It's like a deeply anti-humanist philosophy. These people fundamentally don't get it, that what makes art, what makes music special is human input. That's what we see in it, that's what we appreciate. You cannot create it by generative AI. So the fight back against this AI has to start. Now we can start by legislating for the right to opt out of AI. No worker, no user of public or private services should be forced to interact with AI and have AI deal with their data without their consent. We also need to place real limits on data centres. They're using up 80% of the electricity in Dublin, 80%. They're using up an unknown quantity of water. It may be the reason for the restrictions that we're currently seeing, but we don't know because they don't have to tell us how much water that they're using. Despite the data centres being so huge already, they want to double. They want to double so that they can deal with the insatiable demand of AI. That cannot be allowed to happen. If it does, it makes it impossible for us to reach our climate targets. We need an outright ban on data centres, more data centres being built and we need real restrictions on the ones that are already here. People's needs, our need for a society which is meaningful, which produces decent art, the needs of artists, the needs of creative people, all of that needs to come before the profits of big tech in our society.