In January 1977 Tony Moon, who worked in a record shop in south-east London, put out the first issue of the fanzine Sideburns. One page had an empty space, so he filled it with a quick drawing of three guitar chords. Under each one he wrote: this is a chord. This is another. This is a third. And on the last line: now form a band.
That page became a symbol of the whole punk movement. The message was that you need nobody's permission. You don't need years of music lessons, a record label or an expensive studio. Three chords, a photocopier and a pair of scissors are enough.
And what does this have to do with AI? More than it seems.
In the spring of 1980 the American writer Bruce Bethke wrote a story about a teenage hacker who uses computers to outwit his parents. He called it "Cyberpunk", and by his own account he was trying to coin a word that would capture the meeting of punk attitudes and advanced technology. The story was published in 1983. A year later came William Gibson's Neuromancer, the novel that turned cyberpunk into a whole genre. Its hero is an out-of-work hacker named Case, but the one pulling the strings behind the scenes is an artificial intelligence called Wintermute, which recruits a team of people to break free of the limits placed on it.
In other words, in the book that defined the technological punk of the eighties, the force that drives the plot is an AI. And there is one more detail, remarkably precise: the AIs in the novel are the property of a wealthy family that runs a business empire. It is hard not to read this as foresight: the most powerful tools would not stay in the hands of rebels in their bedrooms.
But the deeper link is the question punk raised, the one we are asking again today. When anyone can play three chords, what is a musician worth? When anyone can write a paper with a language model, what is a researcher worth? In our view, this is the answer punk teaches: the tool does not set the value. What sets it is what you have to say.
Punk has one more lesson, and it bears directly on what we do here. Jamie Reid, who designed the Sex Pistols' covers, built his headlines from letters he cut out of newspapers and magazines. Each letter in a different typeface and size, like a ransom note. He took other people's material, and still those covers are considered his work to this day. In our view, one reason is that he hid nothing. The cut marks and the glue stayed visible, and they were part of the message.
That is exactly the difference between using and stealing. Using other people's tools and materials is legitimate, and sometimes very creative. The trouble starts when you hide the seams. A researcher who works with a language model and says so is doing what Reid did. A researcher who hides it is trying to pass off a collage as handwriting.
💬 What do you think: are today's language models the "three chords" of academia, or something else entirely?