Uncharted Paradigm Shift of GenAI
We are entering the economy of fundamental ideas, the pure concepts, the original models, the raw styles, the laws, the principles, and there is no turning back.
One of the paradigm shifts brought by GenAI is that it is conversational. That alone is massive; it radically simplifies how we work with computers, and it is pretty obvious it will change User Interface, Customer Experience, and, probably, the majority of white-collar jobs. The path forward seems bumpy, yet it is, to some extent, clear.
But Generative AI brings yet another paradigm shift, critical and yet uncharted:
GenAI affects not only the way we work and create value but also what we consider valuable, making our intellectual property principles obsolete.
Whether you are a writer, a designer, a musician, or an engineer, ... IP rights are the foundation of your economy. Digital format, digital copies, and digital transfer made everything easier to handle and harder to deal with. But now GenAI has digitized intelligence, and everything is in the air. What is creativity, what is originality, what is authorship, what is ownership, what is art?
When we introduce GenAI to creation, it is no longer clear who the creator is, who gets the credit, and, more importantly, the IP rights.
If someone copies the exact sequence of notes of RosalÃa, he will be in trouble, but paradoxically, you can copy her style because neither your ideas nor your style are protectable by IP.
If you are a voice-over actor, you still have rights over your voice and you would have a case if GenAI were used to replicate your exact voice without permission. But we are not talking about a mere recorder here. What if GenAI changes the language you speak? Is that still your voice? GenAI can extract the tone and timber, reflect the time of any voice, and combine, for example, Morgan Freeman and Al Pacino's voices. That voice might be familiar, but it has never been heard because it didn´t exist before.
We enter a maze from which there is no known exit. And we better find one if we are to unlock the innovation engine and ensure we don´t grind our economy to a halt.
In future podcasts, we will cover that uncharted territory. But before we find a way out of the maze, we need to understand better the challenges we face.
My first approach to explaining the problem of GenAI and IP will take us back to Philosophy 101. We are sitting in the classroom, and a lucky professor exposes us, for the first time, to the "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato.
The prisoner Out of Plato´s Cave was using GenAI.
Remember, there was a cave with prisoners inside. The prisoners could only look at the cave´s wall and see the shadows of what was happening outside.
In the confines of the cave. We only see the shadows of what is real, projected on the walls by the sun's light. And we use those shadows to understand what is happening outside.
The cave is today's economy, and you and I are the prisoners inside. We see what is valuable and what is not through the light of IP.
But one day, one prisoner decides to look back and escape the cave.
Well, I am sure the escaped prisoner used Generative AI a day in November 2023. As he made it outside the cave, he no longer saw shadows. His perspective was no longer bound to projections designed for an analog word. He reached a higher level of understanding, beyond the shadows, beyond specific expressions or representations.
Now, we can work with the fundamental ideas, the pure concepts, the original models, the raw styles, the laws, the principles, the source of it all. And there was no turning back.
René Magritte established the difference between the idea and the representation in his famous painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
The painting depicts a pipe, but the text below states the opposite: this is not a pipe. The image is a representation, not the pipe itself. This paradox is another compelling way to communicate the changes needed in IP laws.
A copyright is a form of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship, such as books, paintings, music, and films.
Copyright protects the shadows, the specific representations of the pipe, not the pipe itself, nor the style, principles, genres, archetypes, models, patterns, or laws. Whatever you call them, they are not protectable. You cannot protect the second law of thermodynamics, just as you cannot protect DNA with IP.
That is precisely what GenAI works with and is very good at.
GenAI crushes large amounts of information into knowledge, extracting the juice, the DNA, and the patterns behind data. When you work with Generative AI, you work with principles, concepts, models, and laws that are not and probably will not be protected.
So, who do we assign the IP to if Ai comes up with a groundbreaking molecule?
Now, we can recreate infinite instant-free variations and recombinations at zero marginal cost. Generative AI allows massively increased production of creative content and assets like images, texts, audio, video, etc. This vastly expanded output of new works is analogous to increasing the money supply or "printing" more content.
This means supply may vastly overtake demand. This oversupply of abundant creative content flooding the market is likewise inflationary.
Like monetary inflation devalues currency, this content inflation could devalue or diminish the specialness and uniqueness of a specific creative work.
And because IP protects the expression, IP is today worth less than yesterday. IP is obsolete because it operates at a different level.
The prisoner that escaped the cave is also you, using GenAI. It is a superpower that gives us access to the underlying; it brings us upstream to tap into the essence and creatively recombine the unprotected fundamentals. But we have very little idea what the resulting economic changes will be: it is uncharted.
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