The Man: The Person and The Past
It has been touted to be the trial pitting the rights of humanity versus the rights of artificial intelligence. The commentators, scholars, academicians and the artistic fraternity have spared no stones unturned in campaigning for the ‘right thing’ to be done and attained. What is the right thing that everyone really is hoping for?
M was a world-renowned illustrator, cartoonist, web-artist, writer, and painter. His magic led him to achieve what no one at his tender age of 24 had even dreamed of having: Developing and originating ideas faster than the AI around the world. He was not the first artist to be having had a surgery to insert a neuro-hyper link chip in his brain wherein his ideas, thoughts, and feelings could be read accessibly by the chip and being able to transmit them readily. This was the epoch wherein further experiments were done on meta-humans and meta-AI on the fluidity of their AI beings or their human form. M was what you called a technologically handicapped person in the olden days. But M’s wife pushed him to go with the advances of the world or his old-school soul would be sucked into the vortex of nothingness from yesterday when the world was venturing into the miracles of tomorrow. M loved his wife, you see. Although, he loved his art even more; his artistic credibility was being questioned through the towns he went to sell his picturesque novellas. He decided it was time to embrace the revolution of the artificial intelligence and what better way to do it than having another brain inside his own.
M’s wife and him were married for almost two years by then; they married at a succulently ripe age of 21 each when M wanted to achieve greatness in the world and bore a daughter through his wife the following year. They had saved enough for the alienoid parasite of an intelligence to reside in his brain. M had a basic understanding of what the system in his brain was supposed to do: try to emulate whatever M was thinking or feeling in his mind. Thus began the wonderful journey of this man who never tasted even a morsel of success, and here he was selling millions of copies of his stories per week. M had received a godsend inspiration device that he could utilize till he died. The royalties were pouring in like cats and dogs. M’s artistic acumen was at the apogee, and nobody could ever hope to reach that level even in another millennium.
It has been seven years since the world came to know of a man named M and his elusive poetry of words, paintings and art. It has also been two years since the International Court of Justice has recognised the Artificial Intelligence systems as a legal and juristic person across the world. If the popularity that M generated and garnered wasn’t enough earlier, he has had achieved a God-level presence among his fans, anti-fans, mega-fans, AI-fans, and the public in rem. He has been given the Guinness World Record for having the fastest artistic brain in the world; he can think of and generate artworks faster than AI. There had been several inconsistencies, doubts and inquiries done into how any of the stories that M produced were valid when he created it with an AI chip in his brain. There are still questions asked of how he could think faster than the AIs around the world. Was it that AI originated the ideas first and was then transmitted to his brain through neurons or was it that his mind created the artform already and AI being connected to it, simply emulated that onto itself? Regardless, the buzz he generated for the artists through his artwork for remarkable. His was an impeccable potpourri of prose, illustrations, poetry, and painting traversing through the languages into an aiguille of artistic perfection.
M would feel worthless and hapless at times. He was formulating the same art as before, just more refined now. Was he getting recognised because of his unique voice and timbre or was it because of the concomitant collaboration of his mind and the shrill voice in his head, but especially the invariable artificial intelligence that was courting the attention of the billions? This dilemma would give him sleepless nights more often than not. He had started sleeping and eating less and less. He did wonder how his artist’s block never came or how he never felt burned out even after 22 hours of constant work and labor.
That was then. And this is now. M has just been convicted of plagiarism and hurting the sentiments of AI throughout the world. The petitioner AI named XO)_1 refused to answer the media’s probing questions and requested everyone to respect the artist M and his contributions to the field, nonetheless. The President of the Generative AI Society, Ms. QWERTY!)C similarly rejected our attempts to interview her and ask her of the future of the artworks made by the Generative AIs in the future. Finally, when we reached the abode of M and his family, we were left distraught to find out that he had already moved somewhere else altogether.
A witness statement professed by Mr. M’s wife in front of the ICJ is making rounds a lot in our media circle:
“My husband has hurt a lot of people in his life. And my husband has been hurt by a lot of people in his life as well. I just can’t make sense how he can hurt the sentiments of something/someone who can’t even tangibly have an existence of its own without human creation or intervention. If the AI’s religious sentiments were hurt without even existing, then my husband’s rights and religious sentiments have been curbed upon just by the non-tangible existence of the so-called AI.”
