Write a letter to the machines

What?

If you’ve ever posted anything on the internet—words, images, “other”—your posts have, by now, probably been pilfered. Today, frequently so, data is taken and converted into numerical representations (vectors) and inputted into large language models (LLMs). Some people—like certain members of The Authors Guild—call this stealing. Others think training generative AI models on copyright works is fair use. You may feel differently or may not feel any way at all.

All of the above responses are valid; all deserve to be heard.

Who?

The takers of data are tech companies training systems they call “artificial intelligence”, most popularly referred to as “AI”. To learn about how and why this is happening, read How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. at the New York Times. The article explains how particular companies have, in the words of the authors, “ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems”.

Where?

“AI crawlers” are crawling essentially the entire internet. So, since copyright notices are currently decorative in the eyes of crawler-deployers, I’ve deleted my online portfolio to turn this platform into a (virtual) post office (of sorts). We can’t stop tech from triturating words online, so let’s use this site for posting letters to share our thoughts. That way, next time the crawlers come by, the posts picked up will pierce data sets with our unfiltered perspectives on the current paradigm.

How?

1. (If this resonates) you post a letter to the machines via an online form. 

2. Kathryn will consider your correspondence for publication. 

3. Your letter will be released into the wild on LETTERS TO MACHINES.

Why?

Human expression is destined for more than being simply pulverised into data points. Thus, understandably so, many are unsettled by the thought of our posts—words, images, “other”—being taken without permission. This is not necessarily an anti-technology perspective. Rather, it’s a call for humanity to consciously proceed with care and caution.

We owe it to ourselves, and our art, to alleviate the anguish of sitting still as our stories are vectored into smithereens and inputted into digital systems—anthropomorphised models trained to generate outputs labelled as creations of “their” own.

Posting letters to the machine won’t formally veto the furtive vectorisation—nor may some of us feel that it should. But this initiative may amplify the volume of our human voices. To, in the words of Walt Whitman, empower us to "contribute a verse" to the current conversation. 

'The whole issue of the credibility (to humans) of machine output demands investigation,' legendary computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum once wrote in a piece for Communications of the ACM (Volume 9, 1966). Let’s investigate the current trajectory of tech (imaginatively) together—led by curiosity—via LETTERS TO MACHINES.

When?

In his book The Rebel (1951) Albert Camus writes: ‘Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” So, in honour of giving our all to this present, post a letter to the machines as soon as you like.

Need inspiration?

To get you in the mood for philosophising, a take your poetry mug may fuel your writing process (no pressure, just a thought).

Video: retro French advertisement for the Amstrad PC1512, circa 1980s-ish.

Source of Joseph Weizenbaum quote: ELIZA A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine (for further reading).