Episode Details

When a thief uses a crowbar to break into a house, do we arrest the crowbar?It sounds like a silly question. Of course we don't. We arrest the thief. The crowbar goes into an evidence bag and, presumably, into a very dull retirement. And yet, when it comes to artificial intelligence, a great many of us are standing in the street shouting at the crowbar."AI is stealing our jobs!" "AI is stealing our art!" "AI is stealing our words!" And some of that is true, or partly true, and we'll get to it. But I've been noticing something. When an illustrator who has spent fifteen years mastering her craft uses AI to speed up her work, nobody accuses her of theft. She's still the illustrator. She just has a faster brush. The same goes for the composer, the programmer, the teacher, the translator who uses these tools to do more of what they already know how to do.