Author: Brandon Butler

[Brandon Butler] The past six months or so have seen the seemingly sudden appearance of several startlingly powerful AI tools that create complex new textual and visual works in response to relatively simple prompts. You probably know at least a couple by name: ChatGPT (for text) and Stable Diffusion (for images) are the ones that seem to have taken over my social feeds. These tools are creating a buzz in part because the works they generate are sometimes good enough to pass for or replace the work of humans, at least in some contexts. This raises a laundry list of policy questions, some as old as the story of John Henry (will machines put humans out of work?), others as 21st-century as data sovereignty (how can nations govern data pertaining to their citizens when it flows seamlessly around the globe?).