Imagine if there could be two of you. With the recent developments in generative AI that's become possible very rapidly. Old science fiction stories about digital people are quickly becoming reality and Black Mirror episodes are proving to be more prophetic than we might have expected.
This new technology presents opportunities for growth and abundance, but there are also real dangers to avoid. At our company, MIMIO.ai, we think about these questions every day in order to provide AI products and services to people in the most ethical way possible. Unfortunately, every day brings news of companies using this technology in ways that completely disregard people's rights.
As we have learned with the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, employers are more than willing to create a digital copy of their employees without their consent to reduce human labor costs. The strikers are only the first people to try to push back against that abuse. But they are not the only people who may be victimized by it. If it's possible for employers to create a digital replica of a human being, what's to stop a scorned boyfriend or a grieving widow or a zealous fan?
We have intellectual property rights over the inventions we create and the stories we tell, but until this technology was developed, it's never been necessary to own the rights to our own story in this way. We need to take a stand on this issue now, because it is much easier to protect your rights than it is to regain them.
Fiction, when done well, can serve as a roadmap for the future, both positive and negative. It shines a light on what we shouldn't do and what we can become if we follow the paths it describes. We haven't listened well to the warnings of our ancestors and now we find ourselves in a situation where our identities are being stolen by corporations. Some work has been done to secure our identity rights with laws regarding revenge porn, but those laws aren't sufficient to address the range of abuses possible with generative AI. Taking a person's digital identity should qualify as identity theft—a type of fraud which, with the advent of digital records, became sufficiently important that Congress passed laws to ban it. The only person who should have the right to make a digital version of you is you.
Any digital version of you should be treated as an extension of your person. The rights that protect your identity, your livelihood, and your reputation should extend from the physical world into the digital. No one should have the right to take the things that you've said, done, and written to make a digital copy of you without your permission. Your story is your legacy. You should be in control of it.
It will take time and effort to put those principles into practice, but safeguarding people's rights to their likeness and their ideas is worth it.
Safeguarding digital likeness rights isn't only important for the people being copied—it's also important for AI companies wanting to provide services. It may be the case that someday Adam Conover, a member of the WGA negotiating committee and strike leader, finds a digital assistant that really does help his writing process. Under current laws, he would rightly be hesitant to engage with any company to create that AI. Legally it would likely entail transferring his identity rights. In order for AI developers to get the kind of engagement we need to make future breakthroughs, we will have to begin taking people's rights seriously.
People should have control over the actions taken by their digital counterparts. If Adam doesn't like a script that his digital persona writes, then the studios shouldn't be able to use it without his explicit consent. If money is made on the basis of work done by his digital reflection, then he should profit fairly from that work as if he had done it himself. Without providing these sorts of licensing guarantees we will see people become more and more hesitant to engage with AI of any sort and only the most unscrupulous companies will flourish. Securing people's digital identity rights would be easiest if the guilds and ally companies in Silicon Valley work together.
At MIMIO.ai, we take these concerns very seriously. We are advocating for laws that safeguard people's rights to their likeness, their ideas, and their story. Too much power has been given to corporations profiting from data and identity theft. While we wait for legislation, we pledge to always respect our users' identity and data rights. Every AI we make of a person will only ever be made with that person's explicit consent and they will maintain ownership of all the information related to their digital reflection. Their digital persona will never be used for anything without their consent and any profits made will be theirs. Hopefully, other companies working on similar technology will do the right thing and pledge the same.
It takes all of us to make the world a better place, and while we can't fix every problem, even in the AI space, we will do our best to fix this problem by providing an AI option for people to use which fully respects their rights and their identity.
Blake Lemoine is the AI Lead at MIMIO.ai. Blake can be reached at blake@mimio.ai or on Twitter, @cajundiscordian. Praveena Dhanalakota is Founder & CEO at MIMIO.ai. Praveena can be reached at praveena@mimio.ai or on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/praveenadhanalakota/
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
