Today’s article in the Straits Times is an interesting development.
For a small country like Singapore, AI is a powerful tool for the future. In the eyes of the policymakers, autonomous technology like AI can help to mitigate the effects of a rapidly ageing population.
The creative industry in Singapore has now rightfully surfaced a couple of real issues in pursuing such technology:
- Today’s AI technology is mostly limited to synthesizing and re-writing existing (human-created) information. This inevitably results in mass infringement of the original authors’ intellectual property.
- The seemingly useful technology is in fact the death of original creation and creators. When will (human) consumers reject unoriginal, plagiarised and/or synthetic content, if not now?
It will be interesting to see how the policymakers will respond to our creative workforce. It remains crucial that clear guidelines are drawn up to protect original creation, and I hope we (Singapore) seize this opportunity to do so.