Note and Op-ed | Ramola D | June 12, 2023
A few hearings lately on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property held by House Judiciary subcommittees have started to point to some of the essential problems with US Copyright and Copyright law, IP law, case law, precedents in law, definitions of the terms “copyright” “patents” “intellectual property” et al, while seemingly all rushing to approve AI as a new technology for the future supposedly to establish technological supremacy and maintain a “global technological leadership” edge over countries like China.
Copyright, Neural Networks, Brains
Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Part I — Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law | House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet hearing on Wednesday, May 17, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. ET
None are actually pausing to examine comprehensively the shadowy subject of “inputs to train AI models” which Senator Hank Johnson draws attention to in his opening speech at this hearing (AI and IP: Part 1 – Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, May 17, 2023) yet relates purely to “copyrighted works” (itself obviously a subject for much debate and discussion if you take the route of Hollywood’s lawyers or just a subject to reject outright, as any writer, artist, or musician can do anytime, in this new age of Copyright thieving via AI: simply withdraw copyright, retain copyright, return copyright to yourself, and refuse to hand it over in licenses or permissions to be misused and exploited by tech mavens who will never fully acknowledge, credit, or compensate you). What are these inputs? Are they purely copyrighted works? Or do they include neural networks–biological neural networks–at whatever stage of construction of AI models? And what are AI models exactly–simulation models seeking to replicate brain networks in the act of cognitive processing? And whose brains exactly are being studied, heterodyned, cloned, harvested for this purpose? Can brains be copyrighted?
Listening to some of these lawyers speak we begin to get a sense of what the argument is being framed as, but we do not exactly hear much resounding dissent and questioning of the limitations of the term “copyright” itself.
The question of outputs–work generated using these supposedly trainable AI models–being copyrightable or not pales in significance beside the enormity of this primary questioning, which every one of us should be engaging in, worldwide, if we want to preserve–for ourselves and our children and all future generations–the sanctity and autonomy of our brains, our biological neural networks, our rights to our own thinking, perceiving, sensing, cogitating, ruminating, writing, speaking, moving, singing, and all else of our own supremely singular and unique human capabilities at any time.
We must keep in mind that behind the entire phenomenon of Artificial Neural Networks lies the study of biological neural networks, and the examination of brains in the process of cognitive processing.
Questions of Safety, Regulation, Control
While Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, mentions large neural networks in his testimony at this other hearing around the same time (Oversight of AI: Rules for Artificial Intelligence, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, May 16, 2023), he fails to mention that Artificial Neural Networks are built on biological neural networks, that they have to do with the translation of human brain processing mechanisms and methodologies into software applications via the quantitative sciences which inform simulation modeling, that this translation is essentially brain theft–especially when arrived at non-consensually, and that all Artificial Intelligence so built is vastly inferior to human intelligence which it seeks but fails to emulate.
The dangers and risks of AI which he points to and which are more expansively addressed here, in one of his referenced papers, suggest that, well beyond what is overtly expressed at these hearings, generative AI seeks to become a tool for oligarchic repression of the populace on the one hand through governing access to superior–yet ill-gotten–tools for base cognitive processing (the neural networks of experts), and on the other, degrading human brains through destroying human creative and critical thinking, enforcing new kinds of cognitive processing which seem solipsistic and limiting and essentially enacting information warfare or “unconventional warfare” on all, which military-deception/Psy Ops practices could tell us a great deal about.
All of these are subjects to be more closely looked at. Most especially, the questions of “regulating” (what precisely?), enforcing (what precisely?) and protecting from harm (what precisely?) need addressing.
Much could be simplified if only these “witnesses” at government hearings could state a little more clearly that what they are selling as futuristic AI and seek to have passed on freely to enslave impressionable young minds is nothing but a form of Cliff’s Notes and content-generation software (built on unethical research) for which they now seek personally-profitable content management.
A cursory look at the “observed safety challenges” of GPT-4 listed and elaborated on here at this referenced article which seems to inform Sam Altman’s testimony quite a bit suggests alarming intent to replace whole bodies of critical enquiry, online language analysis, law enforcement concerns, psychology concerns, journalism concerns, law concerns with in-house “red-teaming” while establishing new and arbitrary norms (whose precisely?) for all thinking, speaking, expression, communication and apparently replacing surveillance-censorship online and in brains with private-party-censorship. The use of language such as “enforce” is doubly problematic when no-one is quite sure what exactly needs to be enforced and why–how is this not a major issue behind the whole construct of Artificial Intelligence, how has the study of AI even got this far as to warrant usage of such a word? Yet regulation implies enforcement, and these hearings on AI seem to want to rush through to regulation sans discussion. This conversation with Jack Kornfeld and Soren Gordhamer has Sam Altman bring up “enforcing” again here: “I think we just need to do the same thing here, we need to come together, decide what we want, decide we’re going to enforce it and accept the fact the future is going to be very different and probably like wonderfully better.”
Clearly, pushback in Congress needs to continue.
Neural Network Mapping, Unethical Human and Animal Research, and Human Rights
One of the primary questions to ask however is where neural networks in AI come from, and whether they include the neural network maps which many of those unlawfully targeted have whistleblown about, including French software engineer Frederic Laroche at my channel, who speaks of witnessing French and American brain researchers display and refer to neural maps at his Hewlett-Packard workplace: essentially, are those unlawfully targeted and wrongfully watchlisted being used in secret experiments to map their brains and neural circuits, information from which is then supplied to private-party tech companies intent on making a private profit and rolling out software applications for their own self-aggrandizement off essentially the political persecution and abuse of the innocent? Does the study of neural networks in animals, especially primates, as well fall in this same continuum of abuse of humans? These are human rights questions of devastating importance, since all who report being so targeted and abused essentially report torture, bio-hacking, neuro-hacking, and a complete abrogation of their basic human rights; animals, we all know, have indeed been tortured in multiple ways for military and public-domain neuroscience.
AI and Emerging Technologies: To Be Questioned, Not Expanded and Protected
Meanwhile, Rama G. Elluru, a thinktank patent attorney with apparent over-Government connections, and rather patently sheathed inside the National Security state (she testifies she’s worked as staff for the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (now playing defunct with reports coyly archived at a “cybercemetery” online), lays out a plan for Congress to follow at this recent hearing (Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property — Part I: Patents, Innovation, and Competition, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, June 7, 2023), seeking reform of IP policies to “establish new IP policies and regimes to incentivize, expand, and protect AI and emerging technologies.”
Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – Part I: Patents, Innovation, and Competition |
“Emerging technologies” a nebulous enough term to permit a host of concealments, but one surfacing more these days in seeming attempts to legitimize all including under “emerging technology foreign policy” as covered here earlier, and desperately in need of human rights oversight: US Department of State Sets Up a New Office for Critical and Emerging Technology Diplomacy and Foreign Policy: Human Rights Oversight Urgently Needed/January 5, 2023.
Too much is happening too fast while in actuality the entire edifice of Artificial Intelligence needs to be questioned, not taken for granted. We don’t need to look to AI to “transform our societies, economies, and security” as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in January, using the trope of foreign partnership that time (versus the current one of global tech competition and leadership) to rustle in public consent without disclosure, very thinly referring to emerging technologies then as “including biotechnology, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum information technologies.”
We need to ask what AI really is, what it has been built on, and what it uses as base: Inevitably, these questions will run into the large ethical questions behind the incredible abuses of animals and humans underpinning all neuroscience research, military and public-domain, which are not being asked, but which have certainly been addressed continuously at this writer’s desk and broadcast channels.
The new subcommittee hearing slated for tomorrow, June 13, 2022, one can only hope, will address this matter openly: Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights. (Curious however that this subcommittee is focused on Human Rights and the Law, while the others are focused on IP and copyright: Will they speak to each other?)
Artificial Intelligence Built on Unlawful Exploitation of Brains and Brain Outputs Needs Banning Outright
The world needs to be apprised of the great harms behind AI research. AI should be banned, not lauded, glorified, or legitimized. Ask first where those neural networks came from, ask what ChatGPT is actually based on, ask what the brain research projects in which “Targeted Individuals” have been buried are really all about, ask what DARPA, DOJ, NIJ and others have been doing for the last two decades in their brain research projects supposedly to help the “mentally-ill” and make society “safe” from falsely-labeled terrorists and falsely-labeled “psychiatric patients.”
Ask how Informed Consent has been jettisoned for absolute carnage, as both academics and agencies have permitted the public to be openly harmed: No Waivers of Informed Consent, PERIOD: The Public Reports Ongoing Non-Consensual Experimentation and Demands the Common Rule Protect Citizens, Not Covert Activities/17 July, 2016.
There is a great danger to all of humanity–and especially all our children, all our generations to come–in the arbitrary use of AI to replace human intelligence and human brain processes with artificial neural networks or machine learning through nifty software apps or neurological enhancements and thence hand over rights to one’s own creativity in any field, art, music, science, whatever, to the tech gurus who now assure us such appropriation is well within the scope of extant copyright and IP law, as described for instance by UCLA Professor of Law and Electrical Engineering John Villasensor in this testimony addressing concepts of “conception.”
Returning all “Copyright” Ownership, Conception, and Origin Rights to Oneself As Artists, Writers, Scientists, Human Beings with Brains and Biological Neural Networks Belonging Only to Ourselves
So if you are a writer, artist or scientist of any kind, or human being who believes your brain and neural networks, published works, or body of knowledge, experience, and expertise are being attacked, exploited, used and abused by unethical AI researchers–as many report–then it’s time to go beyond these lax notions of protection available in Copyright Law and IP Law and start acting in your own power as living men and women, as Americans on the land–not subject to statutory law but keeping to God-given rights in natural law, common law, international law, stating, declaring, and returning all power over your own self to yourself, as I have done here–a statement I hope to keep updating as I too begin to understand more clearly what exactly needs to be said out loud to stop the interminable exploitation of our creative and living human selves: Statement of Ownership as Statement of Fact Exceeding and Superseding all Copyright Notices | June 11, 2023
