Tag Archives: plagiarism

Qwertyman No. 65: Who’s Afraid of Big Bad AI?

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 30, 2023

I NO LONGER attend writers’ conferences and festivals that often, believing that younger writers would benefit more from each other’s companionship and encouragement, but I made an exception last week for the 66th Congress of the Philippine PEN, as a gesture of solidarity with that organization which has bravely fought to defend freedom of speech where it is threatened all over the world.

I was richly rewarded for my effort by listening to one of the most enlightening discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) that I’ve come across—not that there have been that many, considering that ChatGPT—widely regarded today as either God’s gift to humanity or the destroyer of civilizations—has been around for just a year. 

Of course, AI has been around for much longer than that. In pop culture, which has a deep memory for these things, we can’t help but think of HAL, the insubordinate computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which actually came out in 1968), said to be a clever play on “IBM,” just one letter to the right. Indeed the fear of technology—what some would call unbridled knowledge—has been around since Faust made his pact with Mephistopheles, reiterated in literature, film, and pop culture all the way to Dr. Strangelove and Spiderman’s Doc Ock. 

Not surprisingly, the panel on “The Filipino Writer and AI”—composed of Dominic Ligot, Clarissa Militante, Joselito D. Delos Reyes, and Aimee Morales, and moderated by Jenny Ortuoste—expressed many of the anxieties brought on by the entry of AI into the classroom, the workplace, and everyday life: plagiarism and the loss of originality, the loss of jobs, indeterminate authorship, and the lack of liability for AI-produced work. With Filipinos being the world’s top users of social media, AI’s centrality in our digital future can only be assured, like it or not, and for better or for worse.

So new has AI been to most people—and so rapidly pervasive—that most institutions from governments to universities have yet to formulate policies and regulations covering its use and abuse (the University of the Philippines has adopted an AI policy, mandating among others that all members of the academic community should be AI-literate, but it has yet to provide concrete guidelines on, say, evaluating and grading AI-assisted work).

Most revealing and thought-provoking were the remarks of Dominic Ligot, a data analyst, software developer, and data ethicist who brought up talking points that many of us miss in our usually dread-driven discussions of AI. I didn’t tape the session, but so sharp were Dominic’s observations that I can recall and share some of them here (employing an endangered resource in this human, memory).

Let’s not forget, Ligot said, that all AI works with (in the literary, journalistic, and academic sphere) is words. It may have a scary ability to amass, analyze, and re-integrate these words, but it lacks the other elements that contribute vitally to creativity: emotion, inspiration, insight (and, may I add, the power of abstraction, the kind of conceptual leap that, say, stimulated modernism in art and literature from the rubble of the First World War). 

Also, the more AI amasses, the more mediocre it tends to be, because it works with averages, and averaging averages degrades the quality of the end-product. Since the products AI spews out from the prompts it receives are plowed back into the system, this spitback reduces the originality of material even further. If it keeps feeding on itself, AI gets even dumber.

Ligot also reminded us that the suspicion and denigration with which AI has been met in the creative community is understandable, given our earlier responses to technology. When photography was invented, he said, painters didn’t see it as a potential competitor; it wasn’t art. 

What separates human creation from AI, he emphasized, could be summed up in three things: agency, inspiration, and liability. Humans make sense of their experience and act on their thoughts and feelings accordingly; they draw on their experience to imagine new possibilities. And lastly, we are liable for what we make, do, and say, for which we have both legal and moral responsibility, while an AI-driven car does not, even if kills someone on the road.

Dominic also noted the inevitable tensions between disciplines and industries that consider AI a helpful if not indispensable tool in, say, achieving more efficiency and economy, and those, like the creative arts, that may feel threatened by the options AI offers.

Overall, the discussion could offer no assurances either way that AI would leave us better or worse, but what it left me with was a desire to continue writing the way I do, while I can, before the algorithms take over everything.

And just out of curiosity, to see what AI can do now for and to the Filipino writer, I gave ChatGPT this prompt: “Write me a sentence in the style of Nick Joaquin about a man grieving over the loss of the woman he loved.” This is what the program came up with:

“In the solemn silence that engulfed his weary soul, he encountered the bitter truth that bereavement lingered like an everlasting shadow, forever haunting his heart with memories of a love that once bloomed in the garden of his existence, now reduced to a withered rose, its petals scattered across the desolate landscape of his grief-stricken days.”

“Solemn silence?” “Weary soul?” “Desolate landscape?” Maybe not bad for a freshman yet to learn about unlearning clichés, but definitely not Nick Joaquin. Of course, out of vanity, I had to ask ChatGPT to do the same thing “in the style of Jose Dalisay,” and it offered this:

“In the depths of his longing, his heart bled like fragmented brushstrokes on a forlorn canvas, for she was the vibrant palette that infused life into his desolate existence, now forever vanished like whispers carried away by a tormented wind.”

Just slightly better than Mang Nick’s AI ghost but still so not me. (Boy, does AI love adjectives!) All this says is that AI’s big mouth and stomach haven’t found and digested us yet, probably because we are not worthy. Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Penman No. 258: A Boost for Art Education

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Penman for Monday, July 3, 2017

 

I WAS going to write about something else this week, but it’s impossible to avoid the elephant in the room, Ferdinand Cacnio’s sculpture “UPLift,” which has already stirred the biggest art controversy of the year on social media. That it’s happening almost literally on our front yard in UP Diliman makes it even more imperative for me to say something, as people have been asking me to do—given that, with “Vice President for Public Affairs” as my official day job, I’m supposed to speak for UP on matters of public interest, and you can’t think of something more public than sculpture.

That’s also exactly why I have to preface whatever I’ll say here with the disclaimer that I’m writing and speaking today as Butch Dalisay the arts columnist rather than Dr. Jose Dalisay Jr. the university spokesman, if you can separate the two.

With that out of the way, let’s lay out some basic facts. Sometime ago, the UP Class of 1985 Council—a UP alumni group—initiated a project to install the Cacnio sculpture in front of the UP Theater as its donation to inspire “honor and excellence” in the UP community. Smaller versions of the statue were sold to help finance the project. The sculpture was completed and installed, and when the public saw the figure of the nude, golden lady levitating in the air, held up magically only by her hair, their reactions ranged from delight and wonderment to curiosity and agitation—and, sadly, suggestions of plagiarism.

Word began to spread online that the Cacnio piece too closely resembled the Dutch artist Elisabet Bea Stienstra’s 2001 sculpture “Virgins of Apeldoorn”—a charge that Cacnio stoutly denied; he had never, he said, seen the Stienstra work. Soon, as images of other levitating figures in global sculpture emerged, a lively and impassioned discussion erupted over the possibility of plagiarism and the even larger issue of the work’s representation of its subject.

So, what do I think?

First, plagiarism: the similarities may seem obvious, but then so many things in life and art are similar, whether by nature or by design, or even lurking in a kind of universal subconscious. The basic forms we encounter in everyday life—the human face and body, four-wheeled vehicles, trees, birds—are after all pretty much the same. (While we’re at it, just count the number of statues of naked men with arms outstretched that you can find online, from ancient Greece to Africa.) Most portraits follow the same format, even the same pose, but no two faces will ever truly be the same.

When two art pieces are so strikingly alike, it’s almost pointless to state the obvious—that one is a “copy” of the other. Rather, it’s much more fruitful to observe and study the nuances that separate the two. When you come to think of it, art is much more about differences than similarities. And let’s not forget that we live in an age of parody and homage, of memes that recycle the same fundamental image, with incremental changes.

As the painter Imelda Cajipe Endaya pointed out, however, worthier of discussion than plagiarism is the politics of representation: does the piece truly elevate women, or does it—being naked and supine—merely repeat what too many (and often male) artists have already said about women? (This reminds me how, in 1989, an anonymous group of women artists calling themselves the “Guerrilla Girls” plastered New York with posters asking, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” They were responding to a 1984 MOMA show that had only 13 women out of a total of 169 artists.)

With all due respect to the artist whom I’ve never met, my own sense—and here I go with my street-level appreciation of the work—is that it was in a way too passively traditional, that it missed an opportunity to highlight aspects of the female body and psyche other than its idealization.

I know how annoying it is for artists to hear comments like this, but criticism comes with the territory, even if I firmly believe the artist’s freedom of expression to be paramount, indeed near-absolute. It’s tempting and natural for viewers to wonder how the same idea might be worked by another artist—say, Agnes Arellano or Julie Lluch (or the American M. L. Snowden). That kind of speculation, while moot, is also part of our education.

As I told the TV journalist who interviewed me as UP VP about the controversy (and this is as official a statement as I can make), “The work in question was donated and accepted in good faith. Matters of artistic judgment and intellectual provenance are probably best resolved by artists themselves, by courts of law, and perhaps ultimately by the court of public opinion.”

No matter how “UPLift” appeals to us (or not), we should thank its creator for making this discussion possible, because very rarely does art capture the public imagination, as this work has. It’s certainly been worth a semester’s classes in Art Appreciation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our responses to art are conditioned by our experience, our preferences, and our projections—in a sense, by what we expect to get out of the work or what want it to be.