Yeah, I came to the same conclusion recently about AI creations. AI will absolutely shake up the creative industries in all sorts of ways - I can imagine generic airport page-turners being AI generated and doing quite well, marketed to people who just want a good romp and don't really care about that human connection. Airbrush images of …
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion recently about AI creations. AI will absolutely shake up the creative industries in all sorts of ways - I can imagine generic airport page-turners being AI generated and doing quite well, marketed to people who just want a good romp and don't really care about that human connection. Airbrush images of wolves howling at the moon will likely move to being AI generated and printed onto t-shirts for shops in Glastonbury - but that kind of image isn't about forming a connection with another human artist, because the artist was anonymous to start with. So yes, in all industries there'll be a specific tier of image and word creation that will disappear in favour of AI creation. Some copywriters (the ones who all sound the same and specialise in Professional Corporate Copy) are definitely at risk of losing their work.
Aside from all that, I think AI tools will do two things for most creators and readers/movie viewers/etc. 1. Some artists will use AI tools to do incredible things that wouldn't have been possible before (or would have taken too long) and 2. It'll encourage all of us humans to simply *try harder*. If our prose reads like AI generated words, that's a pretty good motivator to write more interesting prose.
AI generation will only get better and better, but the leap to actual cognitive, self-aware AI I presume is still a very long way away (if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know!). Once we hit that point it's another big shift again, and the discussion alters once more. If an AI machine is conscious and independent, that has massive implications for all sorts of things, including art.
It will be interesting to see where the boundary line settles. If AI does start writing airport books, then it will be yet another think Orwell got right in 1984. But I am not convinced that AI generation will get better and better. I think there is a good chance it is already at or near the limits of its model. People talk about how many more billion parameters the next version will have, but there is a point at which looking at more of the same doesn't add much new information.
We might ask ourselves how much we would understand about the world if we had read all the books in the world and seen all the pictures, but didn't have a body, didn't have eyes or ears or arms or legs, had never felt the sun on our cheeks or the wind in our hair. Not very well is my guess.
And in the tech industry generally, we see the marketing hype and the predictions of rapid revolutionary development peak at just about the point that the technology plateaus. Just think about the wearables revolution that was suppose to change all our lives as we moved from phones to watches and headsets and implants. And since that hype wave, what we have actually seen is phones getting better battery life and more pixels, to the point where there is no longer much incentive to trade in a phone just because the next generation is out. All of the other stuff has fizzled, just as the metaverse has fizzled and crypto has fizzled. Sometimes the horizon seems limitless because you have reached to top of the mountain.
I think part of that is that the tech industry accidentally stumbled into the realms of culture and society, then mistakenly thought they understood it, and have been slowly discovering that they really, really don't. Hence the tech bros in particular being especially ill-equipped to understand the complexities of social media, and yet here we are.
I adored Asimov's robot stories when I was a teenager. Part of me is still excited at that prospect, but the key difference is that those stories were never boring. ChatGPT (currently at least) is remarkable in many ways and technologically astonishing, but it really is quite fundamentally dull - at least in terms of creating new work.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion recently about AI creations. AI will absolutely shake up the creative industries in all sorts of ways - I can imagine generic airport page-turners being AI generated and doing quite well, marketed to people who just want a good romp and don't really care about that human connection. Airbrush images of wolves howling at the moon will likely move to being AI generated and printed onto t-shirts for shops in Glastonbury - but that kind of image isn't about forming a connection with another human artist, because the artist was anonymous to start with. So yes, in all industries there'll be a specific tier of image and word creation that will disappear in favour of AI creation. Some copywriters (the ones who all sound the same and specialise in Professional Corporate Copy) are definitely at risk of losing their work.
Aside from all that, I think AI tools will do two things for most creators and readers/movie viewers/etc. 1. Some artists will use AI tools to do incredible things that wouldn't have been possible before (or would have taken too long) and 2. It'll encourage all of us humans to simply *try harder*. If our prose reads like AI generated words, that's a pretty good motivator to write more interesting prose.
AI generation will only get better and better, but the leap to actual cognitive, self-aware AI I presume is still a very long way away (if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know!). Once we hit that point it's another big shift again, and the discussion alters once more. If an AI machine is conscious and independent, that has massive implications for all sorts of things, including art.
It will be interesting to see where the boundary line settles. If AI does start writing airport books, then it will be yet another think Orwell got right in 1984. But I am not convinced that AI generation will get better and better. I think there is a good chance it is already at or near the limits of its model. People talk about how many more billion parameters the next version will have, but there is a point at which looking at more of the same doesn't add much new information.
We might ask ourselves how much we would understand about the world if we had read all the books in the world and seen all the pictures, but didn't have a body, didn't have eyes or ears or arms or legs, had never felt the sun on our cheeks or the wind in our hair. Not very well is my guess.
And in the tech industry generally, we see the marketing hype and the predictions of rapid revolutionary development peak at just about the point that the technology plateaus. Just think about the wearables revolution that was suppose to change all our lives as we moved from phones to watches and headsets and implants. And since that hype wave, what we have actually seen is phones getting better battery life and more pixels, to the point where there is no longer much incentive to trade in a phone just because the next generation is out. All of the other stuff has fizzled, just as the metaverse has fizzled and crypto has fizzled. Sometimes the horizon seems limitless because you have reached to top of the mountain.
I think part of that is that the tech industry accidentally stumbled into the realms of culture and society, then mistakenly thought they understood it, and have been slowly discovering that they really, really don't. Hence the tech bros in particular being especially ill-equipped to understand the complexities of social media, and yet here we are.
I adored Asimov's robot stories when I was a teenager. Part of me is still excited at that prospect, but the key difference is that those stories were never boring. ChatGPT (currently at least) is remarkable in many ways and technologically astonishing, but it really is quite fundamentally dull - at least in terms of creating new work.
My only rule of writing is "don't be boring." Everything else is secondary. A well-written boring story, is still a boring story.
And, hopefully, I will long gone before AI become sentient and eliminates "flawed, organic lifeforms." 🤣 (Nervous laughter. Only half-joking.)