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 members of The Authors Guild suing OpenAI—call this stealing. Others think training generative AI models on copyright works is fair use. You may feel differently or not feel any way at all. All of the above responses are valid; all deserve to be heard.

Who?

The pilferers 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 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 the words we create, so let’s post letters to the machines via this website instead. That way, next time the crawlers come by, we can let them know what we really think.

Why?

Your human expression is destined for more than being pulverised into data points. Thus, understandably so, many are unsettled by the thought of our posts—words, images, “other”—being pilfered without our permission.

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

Let’s not hide how we really feel. Posting letters to the machines won’t formally veto the vectorisation, but it will amplify the volume of your voice.

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.