Longtime swordsmith Jacob Powning was travelling the world, visiting museums and working with researchers, when he glimpsed something that drove him to make a huge life change.
He had been documenting 2,000-year-old Celtic swords at the British Museum in London when it happened.
“I remember just walking by this beautiful building and looking in the window and seeing an old Windsor back chair at a desk with a lamp and realizing that it was somebody’s office,” Powning said in an interview.
Powning was looking at a lawyer’s office, and “it seemed like a fantasy that somebody could do that kind of career,” he said.
He decided to become a lawyer and on Friday graduated from the University of New Brunswick law school.
Powning had always been interested in politics, regulations and deepening his understanding of how human society works, he said.
“I had done the things that I wanted to do in swordsmithing, and I decided that that was a good time to try moving on to a career in law.”
The change in direction followed an international career in swordsmithing, making swords using heat and special tools to forge and craft them. Powning’s swords have specially designed sheaths, handles and blades featuring elaborate details.
He has friends who’ve made swords for movies and TV shows, including Thor and a Game of Thrones spinoff.
Powning focused on European swordsmithing from the Iron Age and documented swords at the British Museum and in Germany.
His own swords were made in the European tradition and sold to collectors in Cyprus, northern Europe, China, the United States and Canada. One of his swords was added to the collection at the Deutsches Klingenmuseum, a German sword museum, he said.
Now he’s interested in law related to privacy and artificial intelligence. He wants to work on the copyright implications of AI and the fact it is trained using artists’ work without their permission.
This “training” involves exposing AI models to data, including art, which the models use to produce content, replicating some of the original data. AI companies have argued this process is legal because of the “fair use” legal doctrine.
Powning studied the philosophy of human identity and language at university and does not believe a machine can convincingly imitate human language. The suggestion that it can, he said, raises big questions about human identity for him.
This ties into another thing stirring Powning’s interest in law — the fact that “deepfakes” have been appearing before courts in recent years.
The government of Canada describes deepfakes as “media manipulations that are based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI), where images, voices, videos or text are digitally altered or fully generated by AI.”
It warns that deepfakes “can be used to falsely place anyone or anything into a situation in which they did not participate.”
We have the capacity to use AI in a good way and not allow it to be used for evil.– Jacob Powning
Powning said that in the legal world, this has become an issue because it enables “a kind of deepfake defence, where somebody might claim that a video is a deepfake when it isn’t, and there are actually a number of cases where that’s already happened.”
But with proper legal protection, Powning said, “we have the capacity to use AI in a good way and not allow it to be us.ed for evil.”
In terms of advice for artists and artisans who might be considering a new path, “it’s not too late to try something new,” he said.
A lot of an artist’s skills are transferable, he said.
“You have to have a lot of diligence to be an artist, you’re very self-driven,” Powning said. “And that translates really well into academia.”
