Is AI a loom or a crane?

Hullo, it’s Alex in London. The Bloomberg Tech Summit in London dealt with big questions around AI. But first...Three things you need to kno [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hullo, it’s Alex in London. The Bloomberg Tech Summit in London dealt with big questions around AI. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Microsoft posted its [strongest sales in six quarters]( • Apple will roll out [new Macs next week]( • Meta was sued over [harmful youth marketing]( Looming Art has had an immeasurable impact on the technology business. Steve Jobs’ obsession with calligraphy helped shape modern typefaces, Star Trek inspired Jeff Bezos’s work on Alexa and the volume controls in a Tesla [go to 11](. Now with artificial intelligence, it’s clear technology will return the favor. Creative industries are facing some of the most imminent disruptions posed by AI. How they react will inform how other industries tackle the incoming tsunami. Life, after all, imitates art. The question of how to navigate the impending (or ongoing?) AI revolution weaved through much of the London edition of the [Bloomberg Technology Summit](, which took place on Tuesday. Jared Kaplan, the chief science officer of Anthropic, led the charge. The AI company, which has raised money from both Amazon.com Inc. and Google, is positioning itself very much as the responsible AI pioneer. “We think there should be a race to the top for safer AI and more ethical AI,” he said. Anthropic’s pitch sounds similar to the one Apple uses for its smartphones: that it cares deeply about ethics and responsibility. The summit’s [most instructive discussion]( might well have been between Hilary Krane, the chief legal officer of Creative Artists Agency, and Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli. CAA, the Hollywood super-agency, represents many of the actors, screenwriters and other creatives whose work could be alternately plagiarized, replaced or augmented by AI. Synthesia, meanwhile, makes AI avatars for corporate settings — a technology that can negate the need for actors. “I think you have some issues on the front end in terms of what it’s being trained on,” Krane said, referring to AI in general. “And you have some issues on the back end,” she added, citing the example of deepfakes that can use people’s likenesses without their consent or the use of material found online. “Publicly available on the internet is not the same as legally available for use.” These kinds of questions are already front of mind in Hollywood, emerging as it is from a writers strike that sought a solution to many of these issues. Riparbelli offered a question of his own: What separates inspiration from plagiarism? “If I sit with five of my friends, and we just listen to a lot of music from someone, and then we make something that is fundamentally new, I think everyone in this room would agree that’s OK, right? That’s not an infringement of copyright,” he said. “The question is whether we view humans as being different from machines in this context.” We’re a long way from finding definitive answers to these questions, but there’s a good chance that the creative industries, ripe as they are for change, provide lessons for everyone else. There’s a useful lens through which to view all this. Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, Bloomberg LP’s venture capital arm, compared the effects of AI to three sets of technology: looms, slide rules and cranes. - “A loom is designed to replace a person. The same way the Luddites fought against the introduction of the spinning loom.” - A slide rule “assists a person in making a calculation. It speeds you up, allows you to be more accurate and make fewer mistakes.” - “A crane allows a human being to do something that, but for the existence of that crane, they would not be able to do. There’s no amount of time that a human can spend to lift a steel beam five stories into the air.” As companies, lawmakers and consumers alike try to work out where to draw the line in terms of what they think is acceptable for AI, this framework is a good starting point. It’s just not clear to filmmakers, musicians or anyone else which of these three tools AI will be to their trades. —[Alex Webb](mailto:awebb25@bloomberg.net) The big story Tech leaders including Marc Andreessen and John Doerr [gathered on Capitol Hill for the second closed-door meeting]( on regulating AI hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Get fully charged Graphcore’s CEO said the British chipmaker would have [performed better in the US](. Apple will redesign its TV app in an effort to [consolidate its video offerings](. Verizon shares rose the most in three years after reporting [earnings that beat analysts’ estimates](. 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