Navigating the Morality of AI Content Creation

Is it ethical? Is it legal?

The Rise of AI in content creation

After publishing a few posts on the subject of Artificial Intelligence in writing, I’ve come to realize that those who use AI to produce their content have no clear understanding of the ethical nature of what they are doing or why it is viewed as wrong.

The allure, of course, is as it usually is financial gain. What’s wrong with me making some money from blogging? Except I can’t write, so I will get AI to write for me.

The fake

I refuse to call these people ‘Writers’ because they are not! Writing a prompt does not make you a writer! So instead, I call them AI creators. They create using AI.

The creators can churn out articles in moments. Literally moments. “Write me an article on the ethical uses of AI in writing” And within a minute or so, a whole blog post has been created!

This might take a writer hours, sometimes days, to accomplish.

But when it’s a computer doing the work, this is a minute.

“It’s the computer doing the work” This is the part that I have an issue with. The computer has done absolutely everything.

Actually, you could just say “Give me 20 ideas for blog posts about AI” The AI gives you twenty ideas, and you choose one and tell it to write it. Done!

The Art of Writing

Writing is something you learn, you think about how to put something, and then you delete it because it sounds terrible! And after you reword it and find that it sounds worse, so you go back to the one before because it didn’t sound as awful. This is the life of a writer.

In contrast, AI creators operate on prompts, the AI then pumps out sentences according to the parameters of the prompt. I am sure there’s a little work involved. Learning how the AI likes to be asked and so on. Creating the prompt, you know the whole trash in trash out, and so on.

Writing using complete AI is not writing, it’s cheating. It’s 100% not genuine, you’ve done nothing except put a few words into a prompt to have a program make an article from someone else’s words.

Now the legality of it

Is this legal? The point is that if I take one sentence from 400 different resources and put them together … If it can’t be proved I used the 400 sentences from other people’s books it is very difficult to do anything about it.

HOWEVER!

Let’s allow the AI to answer.

So it is trained by its own admission on various publicly available texts from the internet, articles, blogs, websites, books, and so on.

Now this is where it gets interesting.

It’s illegal?

I am not a lawyer, but the answer is pretty clear.

Using an article or any content generated by me without proper attribution or without checking the legal implications could potentially lead to ethical and legal issues. It’s important to consider the ownership and rights associated with any information or content, especially if it is used for publication or commercial purposes.

If you do not own something, you can not publish it! That’s illegal and copyright infringement. Even if it is out there on the internet, you can not legally use someone’s work without their permission. Yes, you can use examples of their work with citations.

But do these Creators give credit to the original work?

The AI does not give you its sources when it writes an article for you. You are more than likely illegally using writing that belongs to someone else.

Now, as a writer, not only is it the legality of the issue here but also the ethics and the outright morals.

If you don’t understand what the AI itself answered, let me make it clear.

You are stealing someone else’s work! You are asking a computer to write something for you using someone else’s writing and then claiming that YOU wrote it.

You don’t even declare that it was written by AI!

And that final part is something that I have a big problem with. If using AI to write is perfectly fine, and ethical and there is nothing wrong with it.

Why are you not using a declaration “This post was written by AI”

Because you know it is wrong? Or because you fear people won’t want to read it?

This post was NOT written by AI

Thanks for reading

Paul