Open A.I. CEO Sam Altman has admitted that A.I. is going to be taking the jobs of and closing down entire industries. He has also recently said, “If I were graduating college at this moment, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history" (regarding the capabilities of the A.I.).

An intelligent man might however infer that Altman was not talking in the royal ‘we’, sense when he spoke about if “he” were graduating college, for if he was only talking about himself: then yes, he would be very lucky indeed to be the owner of Open A.I., and have entire, global industries shift to paying him to use his artificial intelligence tool. But if we are talking about other children, who have been shown in studies to have less critical thinking skills simply by using A.I. tools? Or should they rejoice at the death of their privacy, and art, which especially should have been their intellectual property? The first industry to die is the most human, and the death of their musical or creative aspirations.

The history of human civilization and development is tied to art: perhaps it is true that art imitates life, or maybe it is instead that life imitates art. It is…. what it is, regardless.

Art is a song whose parts have come together like a foam carried under the banners of the sun, over gentle or terrible waves – and from that foam, under the direction of a man or woman, sculpts and forms those bubbles into the rolling curves of a beautiful person, or image.

And if the shaper is a novice, it takes years of crumpled papers and paintings torn in unmuted rage before they can see a way to shape that foam into Aphrodite. There is a time at which a musician can see the path that the hymn must take before the notes have even arrived, and then, if they do care to share it with the rest of us, we are blessed with magic in the form of music.

“Hallelujah,” a song by Leonard Cohen, or personally, “Boots of Spanish Leather," by Bob Dylan, might just be songs that many would find some magic – or humanity in; things created by masters. We as humans have such respect for artists and inventors that to steal a thing they have made and to try and sell it yourself is a crime, certainly in the West. It is like a man who has spent his whole life learning about cars, builds one from nothing, only for another man to come by and drive it away. I presume most would agree that such an event teeters on the stupendously ridiculous.

However, at the advent of A.I., it is now possible to upload a musician’s life's work and tell the A.I. to spit out a song which is done in their style, and even their voice – all without their consent. Likewise, futurism.com reported a novel by the author (pfff, “author,”) of “Darkhollow Academy: Year 2,” had a passage in the middle of the book which was a leftover A.I. response that read,

“I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s Style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath supernatural elements."

 There is currently a bevy of ongoing lawsuits against Open A.I., Anthropic, by prominent authors such as George RR Martin (Game of Thrones), and lawsuits by musicians like Bruce Springsteen, ABBA, and Mariah Carey against sound-A.I. companies. But these lawsuits can only proceed if it can be proved that their art was used illegally, for ‘parody’ is a protected form of free speech. It doesn't help that President Trump signed an executive order (after his A.I. clause in the Big Beautiful Bill was struck down), which mandated that any states that pass new A.I. regulations or are simply deemed as obstructionist to A.I. development will not receive billions in federal funding.

Such a position by the Trump Administration puts pressure on the states to not seem troublesome in regards to A.I. How much trouble would it be if those intellectual-property lawsuits were won, and a judge ordered Open A.I. or other companies to somehow ‘untrain’ their A.I. in that data? Then the Company complains to the President, and the state receives no funding.

It would be nice if the damage A.I. causes Western Civilization ended there, but there are also “deepnude,” and "undressing A.I.” While they are illegal, they still circulate and still exist. Simply upload a photo of a dressed person, and it undresses them. There are more legal A.I. tools used for porn, in which you could upload an image of a person, and suddenly that person is in a scandalous position, doing truly depraved things.

Perhaps you, Dear Reader, are not an artist, but have always wanted to write a book and just don’t have the time. Now you can throw your bullet point ideas into a generator and instruct the A.I. to write a new Lord of the Rings for you, in the style of the linguistic master Tolkien. Perhaps the thief understands that what they are doing by commanding generative A.I. to write them a book is supporting companies and tools that steal from authors who have spent so long trying to put their soul onto paper, and they just don't care.

Working with children for the last ten years, I have recently met children and youth who show me an incredible song or digital picture they made, only for them to admit that they asked an A.I. to do it for them, and they are unfortunately incredibly proud of work that they didn’t struggle at all in creating or learning how to do any of the steps themselves.

I'd imagine your son or daughter in their room, playing late into the night on their guitar and singing the things that rip and tear at the heart you as a parent have worked so studiously to strengthen over the years. But it can’t be helped: the outpouring of chemicals in their developing brain is too much to handle, and their fingers play the emotion that they struggle to express otherwise. If they made a song and uploaded it anywhere, someone else could take that song and that voice and dump it into an A.I. machine, and now that future that your son or daughter could have had in music has been taken from them. Everything they practiced and have done will flood the internet into everyone else’s Spotify playlist. (A.I. “artists" do not have to label themselves, so-and-so anymore; it is getting harder by the day to distinguish them from a real person.)

Subscription A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends are on the rise, and there are already terms floating around online forums and among youth for those A.I. companions, notably the kids call them, “clankers.” First, it was dating apps, then it was the seclusion that happened to us during Covid, and now it’s A.I. companions.

If you do not make yourself heard to your senators and representatives now, in these final hours, you, Dear Reader, will watch with everyone else as art, and music, and rich tellings of human passions and the privacy of your children and partners will be gone, along with true human courtship skills and honest relationships.

How fortunate once more were the older generations to have their art and music and honest pain and honest passions of the soul to make a living off of. Now that music you love can be copied by anyone with a finger and access to the internet. 

Shame on anyone who supports the death of their children’s dreams or their daughter’s privacy.

“So happy should I be from my good fortune of having A.I. tools, if I were graduating now," Mr. Altman of Open A.I. declares during a comfortable podcast as he speaks about the ruin of industries, without speaking about the death of romance and human expression (and value) in art.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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