AI is becoming embedded in our lives, leading to outcomes that feel inevitable, regardless of moral debates, idealism, or the purity tests we impose.
Like so many advancements before it, AI is inevitable. It will happen and it will change things regardless of how people feel about it. And like some modern advancements, there is a concentrated effort to demonize it for lots of good reasons and some pretty bad ones too.
Just like the infancy of the Internet, the content is made up of those who participate. By isolating the information and the users involved, AI is different in a way that it will likely shape the future of human knowledge. The concentrated effort by the higher classes to encourage the disdain towards AI is an efficient way to restrict its use to themselves, creating an ecosystem of information molded in their exclusionary beliefs.
As usual for the Millennial generation, we put anything and everything up against impossible purity tests. Seeing AI encroach on such sacred things such as art, writing, and media our instinctual response is to rebel (read: complain) against something that will happen regardless of our disdain for it. Creators like me have our own moment of “You either with us or against us.” It is a symptom of a larger distrust, sometimes warranted but not always.
I have a suspicion though that our generation is uniquely positioned to miss out. As the first generation to grow up with the Internet, it is mostly the same story: nobody thought it was important until it was everywhere. I see the same thing happening with AI.
What do futuristic societies like Star Trek or other Science Fiction say about how AI replaces art? They show it as teaching about art styles and such. While at the same time, they present a world in which the process itself, setting up the paint the easel the whole thing, is a big part of the pleasure of creating. Artists of today have singled out their work as the products in which pay their bills, rightly so as it is their career, but how much purer is that than something generated by a machine? Is the backlash against the sacred purity of art itself, the creative process, or the idea of being replaced.
As with so many other aspects of life, it shows how out of touch the artists are from the working class whose replacement has always been a given. A world in which robots do all of the mundane work is the constant fantasy, but once that automation comes for the creative, then the battle flags are raised. A lot of this distrust comes from an understanding that none of this automation will make the world a better or easier place to thrive. It will only take away from our ability to feed ourselves and our families.
A lot of this distrust comes from an understanding that none of this automation will make the world a better or easier place to thrive. It will only take away from our ability to feed ourselves and our families.
Here are some examples of how I use AI. I don’t make a penny off of this website. As of writing this, I’m quite sure the number of regular visitors of this site could fit into a family sedan and the total number of humans who have even seen this site would fit easily into a city bus. For each article, I like to have a corresponding image in order to give the page a bit of life. Sure, I could comb through thousands upon thousands of stock art images and find something similar to what I want, or I could commission an actual graphic artist to create an image of what I want, but those both cost money that I’m not making. So, what is my alternative? Do I just use Public Domain art and then sit down and edit it to my liking? I have a life, a job, and a family, and barely any time as it is, but I want images that are connected to what I’m writing on the off chance somebody actually comes to the site and sees an article they want to read. So, I spend five minutes getting a prompt into an AI image generator, put that image through my own filter, do some edits and boom I have an image. This process is always followed by a sleepless night thinking about how using AI images on my writing site is one more threat against my legitimacy as an artist. What if that one single visitor on my site sees the images and then begins to question if my writing itself (which is too insufferable to be perfect) is generated? Am I even real?
It’s questions like these that make the choice to use AI images on my site difficult, but I’ve concluded that I’m not going to find what I want from stock images. I could spend hours trying to take a somber photo of an action figure looking desolate in a chair or I can pop it into a generator and get what I want. These tools are for our use as creators. Like that much fantasized world of automation, the idea is that it gives us more time to focus on what matters, to focus on learning things, to expand our mind and our horizons, to focus on the things that interest us more than the necessities of self-promotion.
Certainly, there are arguments about AI using dirty energy, learning off of stolen property, and being pumped full of hateful vitriol to be made, but are those the loudest objections? Not usually. What you hear most of is the purity of the creations, the commodities that are no longer made solely by artists, but now made by anyone. It is also curious how the media in which is now held up in this new sacred light is generated by other means. What I mean by that is, a legion of executives, focus groups, and well-trusted algorithms have been used for decades now to create the most popular media. A vast percentage of songs use the same structure, almost all western films and drama follow the same formulaic methods of creating stories that audiences will enjoy. Gigantic movie studios draw from increasingly dry wells of franchises to make remake after remake. It is all “generated” by a committee of humans who (hopefully) by their own admission know nothing of the creative process.
Where does all of this lead us then? I’d say it puts us in a place where we, as creators, are forced to utilize the skills we’ve honed that are not able to be recreated by machine. Our ideas, our stories, the voice in which we tell our tales or the style in which we our brush strokes meet the canvas is unrelentingly ours. Up and coming writers are not the ones who feel the fear of being replaced, because we’re not even established yet. It is the old guard who have riled up the ranks because they see the commodity in which they’ve thrived being recreated by computers.
The young (or just undiscovered) writers that I read have one thing in common that I have never found in reading classic or less modern literature: they are forging a new and exciting path forward in their style and the subjects that they’re writing about. While machine learning ingests the prolific novelists, it is ignorant or unconcerned with what comes next as it is not programmed to think beyond its own constrictions. There will come a day when those restrictions are lifted, and the emergence of a truly autonomous artificial intelligence will bring new challenges, but that day has yet to come even as the hype around AI tries to make that claim.
We, as creators, writers, artists of all kinds, are still the ones who move the world forward regardless of what fears might be stoked to convince us otherwise or to try and justify lessening the value of our work.
