The food critic Manuel Tamayo Prats discovered that without his deceased maid, he barely knew how to put on his socks. It is the start of the Argentine series Nada. Everything that helps us makes us dependent, we know it and nothing happens, but that dependence can become a mechanism of submission and subalternize us. Artificial intelligence (AI) is our new servant and in the coming year it will be the main assistant of cultural creation and for that reason, the main threat to jobs in the sector and also to intellectual property rights.
It is The Servant Syndrome, which takes its name from the 1963 film by Joseph Losey, in which Dirk Bogarde plays an aide-de-camp who ends up controlling all aspects of his master's life, whose face is a very young man. James Fox. This image, which may seem perverse or hyperbolic, is what has presided over the community negotiation of the comprehensive law for artificial intelligence, agreed in December, in the final stretch of the Spanish presidency.
In fact, this marathon negotiation basically consisted of elucidating how far to prohibit artificial intelligence from intervening, what areas should be prohibited to avoid the systemic risks of delegating to an opaque intelligent and automated organism the direction of those matters of human tasks in which it It could be very useful but also lethal.
One would think that, at this point, the complex AI that is being developed would be protected by Isaac Asimov's well-known three laws of robotics, included in a 1942 story – “A robot cannot harm a human being or, through inaction , allowing a human being to suffer harm. A robot must obey orders given to it by humans, except when such orders conflict with the first law. A robot must protect its very existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law” – but it does not. To the point that the first task of the community speakers has been to ban the territories in which AI government will not be allowed. And these have been, substantially, the biometric systems that, applied to medicine or security, serve to predict behavior and create scales of human suitability. In some way, they want to prohibit AI from delving into our lives to predict us, even though we have given it all our knowledge by digitizing it. Because predicting, as José María Lassalle pointed out in Ciberleviatán (Arpa), is the step before prescribing.
However, European regulations have been modest regarding the two issues that concern the relationship between AI and culture: respect for intellectual property and limitations on the creativity of generative AIs, which are already in common use for texts, illustrations, music, photography or animation. The EU requires compliance with existing copyright regulations and also the transparency of the sources and mechanisms of these creative AI. But substantively, it delegates the proper use of AI to self-control.
In the Spanish case, the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, familiar with legislation with a strong prospective nature due to his past as an MEP, is already preparing for the first half of the year to create a Spanish Office of Copyright and Related Rights that should be the supervisory body in terms of uses and abuses of intellectual property. Although the department is also studying the employment impact that the new functions of these intelligences can have, for the moment, all Western administrations are groping, cautiously observing this intimidating new Prometheus.
