Artificial intelligence will have some great uses to serve mankind. It will also have some that will take from mankind. I had two books stolen from me among millions of books. For the historic information is my guess. How does AI get smarter? Have you ever asked yourself that question?
Enter English actor John Rhys-Davies. He is full of fantastic stories. And he told a lot of them at Fan Expo Philadelphia. Some I will detail in the next article but this one may affect a lot more people. Not only people like me but people in the entertainment field. Creative people. We are all at risk.
“The field is developing so quickly. And of course, the studios are aware of this. I got offered a chance to do a little cartoon the other day. The actual contract was actually longer than the script. And it came from the officers of Warner Bros. There were pages of what I must not do to offend people on sets. And, you know, pages of that. And two little paragraphs are separated widely. One is that the studio will own all the studio recording, etc, of you in the studio, the actual script itself, and any interview material that you do afterwards, in perpetuity, and that is included in the field, when you say, fair enough. And the other bit, said, the studio asserts the right to use all the material in any way, without further payment, in any manner or with any technology, yet to be invented.”
Full stop. Seriously? The actor had more to say.
“In other words, they could take my voice, for instance, and use that for other things. Or even create a John Rhys-Davies sort of voice and put your brand in there.”
His response is what all creative people need to see.
“I wrote, no producer should have ever put out a contract like this. No actor should ever accept it. And no lawyer should ever write it because creative people are the lowest fruit on the tree that AI will be picking. But not much further up the tree than the lawyers as well.”
After the show, I met up with Rhys-Davies for a brief minute and told him about my story, and he had this to say.
“There’s a trickle-down effect, and all of us get something out of the inequities and inefficiencies of capitalism. But if capitalism is doing that, then there’s a huge number of people left out, and potentially will have to be cared for. Who will be paying for it? It would be the people at the top. And they won’t want to do that for long. And as I try to point out to them, you know, those people at the bottom, you know, will be very envious of the people at the top. And the other thing is, if the people at the top suggest to AI that they deal with the problem, there’s no reason why AI should be saying, “You know what, the real problem is at the top. Let’s get rid of them.
“But.. That’s only one of the problems. What we have to try to do is create a harness. A harness that we can fit artificial intelligence to the plow, to do the things that we want it to do. But not everybody will be singing that same song. And if I don’t particularly like your country and I have AI, I might just get it to, well, let’s have a look at proteins and see what we can do there. Let’s try and go for that terrifying thing – mirror chemistry, you know, where you can create a mirror image of a living thing, perhaps with just the arrangements of the atoms in a different way. And that would, you know, if you make a bacterium like that, there are no defenses known to mankind. Now, the people who are working in that field are saying, look, we’re 20, 30, 40, 50s years away from that, but this is a field that we must not develop. At least they’re thinking that far ahead. I don’t think anyone has thought ahead for AI.”
Rhys-Davies did meet a great AI lawyer who is working on these matters, but I’m writing this article to keep people from making this mistake. Nobody is immune. Make sure you have a lawyer look at any type of agreement that you may sign.
I thank John for his candor and intelligence. He is attending an AI convention shortly, and he is the perfect voice of the voiceless to speak out to try and get AI working for all of us.
John Rhys-Davies photo by Katelynn Reiss
