As AI becomes commonplace, some Garfield County organizations and businesses begin using it for marketing and more
Publish Date: 2026-03-09 16:15:00
Source Domain: www.postindependent.com
Generative AI is being used in multiple ways in Garfield County, from police department social media accounts to artists, businesses and in classrooms from Carbondale and New Castle. What is this new technology and what is the cost?
Artificial Intelligence, like ChatGPT, Grok, and many other AI systems aren’t intelligent in the way they’re marketed to the public as near-sentient beings. Works of fiction like Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” commonly depict AI as sentient and capable of independent thought. In reality, generative AI was created in the early 1970s, but boomed in the early 2020s, with DALL-E, Midjourney, xAI, and more, ranging from essays to videos and photos.
These AI models are trained on large datasets, including books like “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka and “The Odyssey” by Homer. While some of these novels were already part of the public domain, many pieces like “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris, and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien are not. These implementations have resulted in lawsuits from the authors and Author’s Guild.
Midjourney is using works from Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Banksy, and Vincent van Gogh. Amid Midjourney’s data set were artists as young as 6-year-old Hyan Tran’s drawing for a fundraiser for the Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2021.
Generative AI is also used for mathematics, coding, and daily internet searches, the information isn’t always accurate and users can ask it to cite the sources it’s using, but not everyone will. AI is generally unregulated and its usage has resulted in criminal investigations in some cases.
Grok, the generative AI attached to X (formerly Twitter), created by xAI in California, owned by Elon Musk, has been used to produce pornographic images of women and children across the internet. This is currently being investigated by California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
With the surge of generative AI use across the…
