Unveiling the Unauthorized Author

Dr. Shilpi Bhattacharya, Professor and Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Kalinga University, Naya Raipur

The “Bard of Avon” was nicknamed the “Bard” by David Garrick in 1769. The explanation that he gave for renaming was that, he recognized Shakespeare as the greatest poet the world has ever known and he thus wrote “For the bard of all bards was a Warwickshire Bard”. When google was on its journey of AI chatbot, it named it’s AI as “Bard AI” and an upgraded version of it was expected to be “Bard Advanced” or something like “Bard Pro” but unexpectedly, the upgraded version of “Bard AI” was launched as “Gemini” and Sunder Pichai claimed that ”it just gives you more capabilities…..”. I truly wonder, was Pichai googling or needling the Bard? Is it that all LLM manufacturing industries know that their AI’s are nothing but unauthorized authors and cannot stand parallel to the “Warwickshire Bard”, even if it is just a name? When these companies state that AI is artificial intelligence, I feel it is more of artificial ignorance where we are ignorant about the authorship of the text generated by AI. Who might have created the words of the AI generated text? Is it the text created by a single author or there exists a community of authors?

While delving deep to get the answers, I came across a toxic reality that humans have now become data packets in the hands of AI. In the present day networked society, humans are interconnected nodes in a vast web of digital communication. Just as data packets establish connections with multiple nodes as they traverse networks, humans establish connections with others through social networks, online communities, and digital interactions and AI smartly spy these data packets, robs them, rapes them and corrupts their originality. An AI generated text is thus an outcome of unethical practices over a text created by an author and has unveiled itself as an unauthorized author.