Hey, Gemini, write a column in the style of a frustrated reporter
As the world, the journalism industry in particular, falls further and further in love with Artificial Intelligence, there are a few questions that need definitive answers: Is the content created through an AI prompt the creation of the person who created the prompt, the person who created the AI model, or the entity (be that a person or an organization) that owns the compute used to operate that model?
It's an important question, albeit one that doesn't have a real answer that doesn't lead to an AI-style spiral into nonsense meant only to induce shouting matches between the people who love it and the people who hate it.
The ownership question, to me, starts and ends with a simple addition to every prompt. Go into the settings, and in AI instructions, type in "write in the style of…", inserting any writer at the end. Then go compare what the large language model sends back to you to a piece of writing from that person.
I can provide a personal example that isn't just from my journalism career (although, on a side note, it is fun how every "AI detector" claims my work is all AI-generated now, since large language models are largely trained on my work and the work of other reporters without our consent). I have an old, long-dead Archive of Our Own account that contains a lot of fanfiction I wrote as a teenager. A lot of it is overly edgy and silly, with the occasional overarching joke that would hit just often enough to keep my readers from wanting to skin me alive.
"Write in the style of…" added to a prompt, with my username attached to the end, turns the prose created by the AI into something that strongly resembles my own work. That's because Archive of Our Own is a free, open website that anyone could scrape. It may seem silly to me now, but these were works I created for fun, out of passion I had for a piece of fiction that meant a lot to me as a teenager. To think my outlet for some rough times in my life turned into what is allegedly a trillion-dollar industry breaks my heart. I can't imagine the frustration real authors feel.
Now, there are lawsuits against Anthropic and OpenAI that aim to rectify this, but there are plenty of people who are begging for these to go nowhere.
There are more people who, to put it bluntly, hate this. According to a Gallup poll from Wednesday, 39% of Americans believe AI does more harm than good. 9% of Americans consider AI something that does more good than harm. Trust in businesses to use AI responsibly has also declined: 42% of responses said they don't trust businesses to use AI responsibly much, and 31% said they don't trust businesses to use AI responsibly at all.
There has been a resounding pushback against AI and specifically data centers throughout Northern Illinois in the last couple of years. City council and county board meetings now fill with residents fearing a resource-hogging data center will spring up in their backyard. Board members and councilmen are begging residents to see reason, to see what they see: An industry that doesn't put thousands of diesel trucks on the road and creates millions and millions in property tax revenue.
The problem government bodies run into is that people don't have to be rational. When I was a kid, my city closed its public pool because a group of a few elderly people didn't want their tax money going toward it. I've seen multiple times now as a reporter situations where affordable housing developments and solar farms were derailed by the fears of a few people.
If hundreds are willing to take time out of their day to fight against data centers, why not listen?