Who does it better, Google’s Bard or Microsoft’s ChatGPT Plus? The Financial Times put AI chatbots to the test to find out whether artificial intelligence systems can provide users with coherent, accurate answers that also demonstrate some semblance of human creativity and imagination. To answer that question, the experiment’s queries included telling — and explaining — a joke, imagining a conversation between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and predicting stock performance to guide purchasing decisions.

What did the results show? Some questions yielded more satisfying results than others. Bard’s access to Google did not, surprisingly, seem to enhance the quality of the bot’s answers. ChatGPT tended to deliver responses that felt less forced than its competitor’s — despite its command of knowledge only going back to September 2021. Overall, there were no major discrepancies between the two bots and the article concludes that the “robots aren’t coming just yet, but they are not a mn miles off.”

The rise of AI is changing intellectual property rights, spurring debate in the film industry in particular, the Wall Street Journal writes. While courts begin to grapple with the very real ramifications of the soon-to-be normative prevalence of AI as a creative force, the revolutionary technology is also raising philosophical questions. Specifically, is there such a thing as purely novel knowledge production or is all creation based on reclaiming previous creative endeavors? A risk AI softwares incur is how “these engines can generate our intellectual property in new ways, and that is out in the hands of the public,” Paramount Global’s technology chief Phil Wiser was quoted as saying. Hollywood is worried about how AI can circumvent traditional IP laws by tweaking artwork just enough to fly under the radar.

But the industry is pushing back to protect its assets: A website, created by creatives and engineers calling themselves “Spawning,” aims to support artists by allowing them to choose not to have their work used by AI softwares. Paramount is also doing something similar to protect its characters, images, and other creative property to ensure that royalties are paid whenever its assets are used.

The promise of AI: While the new technology raises numerous concerns, like the prospect of replacing jobs — even in creative industries as film editing, dubbing, and translation are beginning to rely on systems rather than people — it also promises immense financial incentives. Tedious work that often requires endless hours can be automated and completed within minutes and special effects can be accomplished for a fraction of the cost, for instance. But, luckily, the one area where AI cannot compete with humans — at least not yet — is creativity as AI is limited within the confines of the data it is fed. Which means that “[people are] going to have to be more creative; more human and more creative than machines,” film producer Jason Blum told the newswire.

Tags: