It's 2025 and AI gets f#cked by its own intelligence.

Image for a book illustration project created using FY studio and reverse image searched to show that this does not breach copyright but leans heavily on the work of others

At present AI does not produce anything original: It can search only what has been pushed onto the web and then, by using an intelligence model (let’s call it an ‘algorithm’) creates a montage of everything relevant to create a mash-up that is guided by user input. Chat GPT and other AI platforms literally take anything they can find on the web and without any reference to its originator uses that data for its own purposes.

AI might enable activities to be completed more thoroughly, or quickly or assembled together in a unique way or achieve unanticipated effects but without ‘content’ creators, the ‘algorithm’ has nothing to work with.

So, I think that it’s hilarious (and ironic) that Open AI, creators of Chat GPT, is investigating and considering suing DeepSeek, the new Chinese AI platform, for violating its intellectual property in creating its R1 artificial intelligence model i.e. Deepseek has used Open AI to create a new intelligence model that was not only cheaper to make but has severely devalued Open AI.

What this lawsuit is really about is not the abuse of intellectual copyright but market place position and income generation.

I admit that Iam guilty of using AI, not because of a lack of ideas but to help distil and steer some of these ideas to an area I would like them to go, however I am acutely conscious that what is generated is not original ( see my piece on my use of AI to generate illustrations for a book : https://www.ronnierennoldson.com/post/illustration-and-finding-a-voice )

Hopefully all this will be sorted out in the same way that streaming and sampling is being resolved in the music industry where those whose work is 'sampled' get both credited and paid royalties but until then when have to accept that whatever we publish informs a mashed-up data and image bank and that by publishing on-line we have essentially waived any notion of intellectual property ownership and copyright.

edit: (The only way to avoid having your intellectual property taken is to opt out / waive the assumed consent that allows platform to harvest your data, but that means asserting your right on every platform and having tried on Instagram found that it is so kafkaesque in its structure that it's virtually impossible to work out what to do.