Plutonium or salt

To use AI or not to use AI, that is the question: whether AI be plutonium or if it be more salt. “Plutonium is deadly in the smallest quantities. Salt can kill you if you use too much of it, but in small quantities, it makes things better.” In this Publishing Perspectives piece, Michael Tamblyn, President and CEO of Rakuten Kobo, gives us that neat distinction, but in the end of his sober discussion of the issue of whether or not it’s “right” to sell AI-generated text, he ends up, to my mind, painfully straddling the fence. It’s fine and dandy to say you incline against the idea of allowing AI into your on-line store, but if you have no means of enforcing the policy, it seems scarcely to matter. To be fair, Mr Tamblyn knows this, and muses about ways of overcoming the problem. I suppose in the end it doesn’t really matter one way or the other — if you make the effort to keep mice out of your kitchen, the world doesn’t come to an end if you meet an occasional mouse beneath the cooker.…