Note: This is a duplicate copy. The original is on Research Gate with DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36643.52007
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss why gen AI is costly and why people should not be charged if they are just querying a chatbot. Note: this article is for general AI, not other AI, such as in washing machines or specialised Medical AI, which needs more funding to become specialised. The algorithm used by AI developers is a black box; they can’t explain the outputs. All they can charge for is energy. So, when energy is scarce, should we even use AI? Can we rely on the internet or the World Wide Web? No, it’s not easy to go back. But then, AI needs to subsequently reduce its subscription charges as energy prices come down. AI is mostly used as a know-it-all portal or an entertainment engine for adults as well as for youngsters. We should know that AI relies on public data, not on AI companies. Much of the data is copyrighted, much is charity-based, or paid, yet AI companies continue to charge as middlemen between our fellow people’s data on the internet and users. But are we losing our own creativity with AI? The AI companies must ask only for the energy charges and their salary, and subsequent developments not the excess. AI has changed the world, but this money belongs to inceptors, contributors, and unknown participants living today who don’t even realize they’ve indirectly contributed to an AI answer for someone in need. For example, each answer on a medical website can help with an SOS treatment for a woman delivering a baby in a far-off village with no medical facilities. This is not safe, but it’s just to give you the idea that AI is useful, and we can’t deny anyone the right to AI. This paper focuses on “Right to AI” as free AI.
Introduction
Why should we give money to use AI? To answer this, let us understand what current-day Gen AI is. Gen AI, or generative AI, uses existing data in the form of text, audio, photographs, paintings, and videos, and applies AI algorithms to it to produce concise outputs for you, the users. So what are the AI companies charging for? The data, text, audio, photographs, paintings, and videos are available on the internet; most of it is someone’s hard work, someone’s copyright, or someone’s creation. Much of it, like Wikipedia, is the result of our friends’ or ancestors’ hard work. The AI algorithm looks up this data, at times summarizes it, at times edits it, and often manipulates and presents it to users. Even the owners of AI companies don’t know what the magic is or how it works; many call it a black box. When something goes wrong, they are themselves clueless. You ask questions, and the black box answers them. No one knows, well, it’s not rocket science. They use algorithms such as associative memory and attention models on text, audio, photographs, paintings, and video data available on the internet.
So, when all the data is taken from the internet, why are they charging such a high subscription fee? Now people have become lazy enough to go online and search for themselves the things they need, instead of relying on AI. Whatever AI tells them, they believe it. There are so many copyrighted works that end up being edited by AI, and so many artworks that have lost their individuality as they are manipulated. For example, with AI, someone can create “Monalisa in a pink gown or a long covered gown”. This ends the original artwork’s uniqueness. Art ends here? Unless the owner uses it as they like. Art is a manifestation of someone’s thinking, and thinking is a unique gift from God; not everyone can think the same way, nor is everyone mediocre in their field. One must respect the gift of mind given to someone. With AI, the traditional art seems to fade away. We must protect the rights of art workers. Not only is art in deep trouble, but creative writing is too, and people still write, and AI engines summarize and produce it as output.
In the next section, we describe various aspects of Gen AI and how it impacts people’s lives, what it is made of, and how it is used. On top of it, we do not say that other kinds of AI are manipulative in nature, no, for example, the AI your washing machine uses is someone’s own inception, and neither is it gen AI nor is it a black box. So this paper does not focus on such AI. However, there are generative AI systems that read research papers and generate new discoveries; the charges incurred must be paid to the service that provides the research papers to the AI to develop a new algorithm. We do not say gen AI is of no use, no it does help in creating new research which is valid, but why to ask such high subscription fee unless the gen AI reads research papers which have a cost associated with it, in that case subscription fee is a valid thing, unless all research papers are available for free to be read by common people. In the latter case, the world would head fast towards a new revolution. So, let us see these issues in depth.
Why is AI subscription not free to use for all?
AI subscriptions can vary by the types of AI in use; typically, we are talking about generative AI. Other kinds of AI, such as Fuzzy logic AI or Medical Bots, are not general AI and are therefore out of scope for the current paper. In this paper, we discuss why generative AI is costly and why people should not be charged high for simply querying a chatbot. The data, text, audio, photographs, paintings, and videos are available on the internet; most of it is someone’s hard work, someone’s copyright, or someone’s creation. Let’s first see these in detail.
The following are available online, but are they free to use?
i. Text: A lot of text is available on the internet. This text can come from contributory sources, such as Wikipedia or paid subscription sites; encyclopaedias, blogging sites, novels, books by writers, and databases are key inputs to AI. The AI uses these free or paid materials for training.
ii. Audio: A lot of freely available voices, text, and information is available on the World Wide Web. These voices can be used to generate new voices and new information.
iii. Photographs: Photographs of yours and your near and dears ones. The photographs of your pets are all available on social media sites. These can be used by AI to do many things. For example, AI can read your media and suggest 2-year-old pictures to you. Many professional photographs are available online, but they are not free; still, they can be fed into an AI model. These form the basics of new photographs, someone surreal intelligence can be put to use to create a new surreal image by combining a real image with an imaginary one, and the money goes to an AI company. Is it right? Not much credit is given to the original artist of the artwork.
iv. Paintings: Many artists used to create genuine art, but now art is just a click away. Trained on freely available images and combined with tagged photos, we can generate countless paintings in seconds. We should bring art back as a respected profession, but ensure AI can’t access the artwork until it explains its reasoning! Art reflects the mind and deserves recognition. AI-generated art is also valuable, but always pay the original artists from subscription fees. For instance, if someone merges the Mona Lisa with a white horse, the museum housing the Mona Lisa should be properly compensated if subscription fees are involved or if there’s profit. Otherwise, it can be used freely since you’re not selling it. Any sale or transaction involving such art should credit the rightful owners.
v. Videos: The simultaneous training of audio and video can be used to generate videos of any person speaking in any language with perfect lip-sync. These videos serve various purposes and can be combined with entertainment videos to create chaos or awe. For example, it could produce a video of someone building a house on top of the Alps, but the original creators do not benefit from this, even if they earn from it — especially for those who know how to use AI to make new videos by merging old ones with associative memories. Such videos can go viral, earning creators money not just from subscriptions but also from ads.
vi. Research Work: Research AI shouldn’t be too expensive; we all know reading research papers costs a lot. Then they create new algorithms or solve unsolvable problems. That’s good, but the cost is high because AI has to pay subscription fees to journals. So, for now, we can focus on the five main points above. We need AI to help in research to push new frontiers and also to eliminate fake research that adds nothing substantial to the research community.
Who wrote all this Wikipedia? Who has written all these texts? Humans? Our friends? Our ancestors! Who has sung all those songs? Who has added all those videos on YouTube from which generative AI trains? Who has written all the research works online from which AI trains to create new research? Not the AI company! So why is the AI company charging for it? It provides an interface between the online written material and the inference engine that combines the text our fellow people have written and infers. The inference can be of the following types:
1. Summarization
Remember me for faster sign in
The AI reads the contents from the internet or from a document you upload. It has a summarization agent that summarizes the articles and produces articulate information to the user. For example, here I asked Copilot to summarize the content from the Wikipedia article I provided.
The AI tools structure the information and present it to the user in a very attractive form, making the user more inclined to read and believe it. Summarizing is a tool that we can pay a subscription fee for. But the question is, why such a high fee, from millions of people around the world? The charges need to decrease.
2. Retrieval
The AI performs retrieval if you don’t specify the source content; it searches for it on the internet on its own. Then it summarizes and presents the outputs, its search engine plus summarization.
3. Generation
The AI generates images and videos based on its learning, as explained above, using attention and associative memories to create new content. This can include changing a person’s face in a video to a cow’s face or swapping a man’s speech for a woman’s. Such a generation seems fun, and people are tempted to subscribe to this entertainment. However, we must remember that the original video is ignored; no one sees or recognizes it. All people see is the new video showing a cow giving an AI lecture. This needs to be addressed — if money isn’t going to contributors, then why is it going to the AI entrepreneurs?
4. Appending
This follows from above: appending a video or photograph of a text with content based on AI is not cost-consuming; the only thing that costs is energy. The algorithm used by AI developers is a black box; they can’t explain the outputs. All they can charge for is energy. So, when energy is scarce, should we even use AI? Can we rely on the internet or the World Wide Web? No, it’s not easy to go back. But then, AI needs to subsequently reduce its subscription charges as energy prices come down.
5. Editing
Editing tools are part of everyone’s life now, but they have learned English from reading open-source English books in the training phase. Is the money they ask for more than the power they consume? Or is it otherwise?
6. Merging
Merging audio, video, and text into one or more forms is common nowadays. AI has learned from videos of all kinds from around the world. It knows more than any human ever will and can create anything you ask for, having ingested all the videos, texts, audios, photographs, and paintings. AI can merge these in various ways; for example, it knows what a cow looks like and can put your body on a cow’s face, making it speak in any language you specify. This process is merging. Do we want it? It’s fun and attractive at first, but we must remember that we are all mature adults now. We need to grow up. Having fun is okay, but we should see that these services should be free, except for energy costs, given that the material they are merging is freely available on the internet, including copyrighted works. The models are built, and they have earned their initial development through trial and error. Now, why are they charging for something that has already been learned and created?
Yes, we all want high-quality output on our screens, and we believe that using top-notch apps ensures we get high-quality solutions. Almost all AI apps I tested produce similar kinds of results because the models are set up the same way and use similar techniques. Do we really need to pay such high subscription fees?
There are many areas where AI is useful, such as medicine, with AI doctors that need to learn more and become more accurate for people who cannot afford a doctor. We don’t mind paying fees to an AI doctor app as long as it is trusted; in places where healthcare is unavailable, we can rely on an AI doctor. However, this AI doctor must be a specialized app focusing solely on AI and medicine, not a generic app that scans the entire internet and mixes information.
Conclusion
We all need help with creating, editing, writing, and analysing. But are we losing our own creativity with AI? AI has demonstrated that after pre-training on all the information on the internet, it can answer any question within seconds. It can create any video you can think of in seconds. But the creators of these AI systems can’t explain what this is; they call it a black box based on associative memory or attention. However, they often can’t predict the output themselves, which can mislead many into wrongdoing. Their AI models are reading all kinds of books, texts, videos, audios, paintings, and photographs online. Most of this material isn’t owned by them. Still, they use it to create new content, which they sell or charge a subscription fee to generate. When this material belonged to our ancestors, colleagues, or coworkers, and we are using it for knowledge and entertainment, why should we pay for it? If we are doing business with or earning from it, we should pay the original contributor rather than AI companies, which act as middlemen between creators and users, and the energy costs involved. This remains an open topic for discussion.
Reference



You must be logged in to post a comment.