The Ethics Of AI

Freemasonry is a moral society

For a lot of years now, a very highly skilled visual artist, Travis Simpkins has been creating wonderful portraits of Freemasons, both of those men still with us here in the quarries, and our Brothers who have passed on.

He freely posts this work on social media for all of us to enjoy.

Photo by Shayna Douglas on Unsplash

This morning he highlights a portrait of a Mason, done by AI, not only mimicking his own style, but doing everything to make it look as if it is his work, including through the addition of his signature.

Plain and simple, this is fraud. It is theft.

And it is immoral.

I’m not a visual artist. If I had to judge my skills as a painter, I’d put myself as a below average kindergartener.

I’m a writer, and I write creative nonfiction.

So like all writers, and musicians, and visual artists, I’ve thought a great deal about AI, LLM’s, and the impact these machines are going to have on our work.

We can’t put the proverbial cat back into the bag, we are going to have to live with these machines (or be murdered by them) so I think we need to consider the moral implications of using them.

Particularly as Freemasons, given that we claim to be good men, striving to become even better men. If we are using a machine to steal, we can’t lay claim to that ‘good man’ title.

Here’s a personal experience:

In 2021 I started writing about Freemasonry here on Substack. And I’ve written lord only knows how many words about Freemasonry here since. Very slowly, over time, I’ve built up a pretty sizable audience. I’ve been able to reach Masons throughout my Jurisdiction, around the country, and indeed around the world.

And I think that’s a really great thing. Because I think that through this work, I can do my part to improve our Ancient Craft.

You grow something like this by posting a lot. All things being equal, the person who posts every day will grow exponentially faster than the person who posts once a week.

For me, I try to post more days than not.

I can’t post more often than that.

It takes me hours to write a post. It takes more time than might be imagined to be active and involved in the discussions following each post. I spend hours, each and every day, here writing, and supporting my writing.

I also spend time trying to help promote other Masons who are writing about Masonry.

It just isn’t possible for me to do more with this than I’m doing.

Two or three years ago, I don’t remember how far back, another Mason started ‘writing’ here on Substack.

But he wasn’t writing, he was using a Large Language Model to crank out ‘his essays’ one after the other. Publishing half a dozen one day, maybe a dozen the next. Over and over and over again, flooding the algorithm with ‘his writing.’

Of course, he never wrote a word of it. He just claimed that he did.

It was, to someone who actually does the work, extremely disheartening.

Ultimately, his experiment failed. He doesn’t post any more.

Why did he fail?

Because AI writing sucks. It is so polished and perfected that its as boring and dull as listening to a Lodge Secretary read every last detail in the meeting minutes. AI might be great at technical, factual writing, but it can’t make creative nonfiction interesting enough to hold a reader.

It’ll probably get better over time. Unfortunately.

But this Mason also failed himself.

He failed himself because we write not only to communicate with others, but to learn. And by just plopping random prompts into a computer and publishing the output, that Brother never learned a damn thing. His entire effort was a waste of his own time, and a waste of the time of those Freemasons who tried to read his machine generated slop.

I don’t use AI in my writing. Not at all, not any bit of it. No running it through some LLM for polishing, no asking a machine to take a look at my grammar or to check my facts. Nothing.

Because I want to learn. Because I want what I publish to be interesting for you.

That’s my stand. Others may go differently.

Substack here is filled with writers. And I see an awful lot of those writers illustrating their essays with AI generated images. It’s easy to do. It’s free. And you can get a perfect illustration for any take on any topic.

I experimented with it a half a dozen times, some years ago.

But I don’t do it.

I use legally obtained stock photos instead.

I don’t do it, because as a writer I don’t want some fake ‘writer’ machine prompter guy using a LLM to defraud people by claiming to be a ‘writer’ and attempting to sell ‘his work.’

And as a writer, if I were to use AI generated images to illustrate my work, I’d be doing to visual artists exactly what I don’t want done to me.

That is, I think, the moral thing to do with my publishing on this platform.

All of this is pretty specific to what I do here, but I think AI has much broader implications within our society.

And I think that as Masons, we need to contemplate the morality of the AI use cases we encounter, and ensure that we are acting in a manner befitting a Mason.

---

Looking for something really great to do this summer? I’ve got the details for three superb Masonic events linked over on my Linky Thingy. Plus everything I wrote last week.

---

Warning:

My email address is not grandunitedlodge @ Gmail.

I’m told that they are emailing Masons, impersonating me, and claiming to be from Emeth. Undoubtedly it’s some kind of financial scam.

Please don’t fall for it.

If you need to email me, you can just hit reply to any of my Emeth posts.