While I’m sure this has been done to death, I wanted to talk a little about the applications of AI in the creative space. We’ve all seen those posts online about “I made a bot watch 5,000 of Hell’s Kitchen and had it write an episode” and allowed a sigh of relief. “At least computers won’t take away jobs from novelists and TV writers,” we laugh and move on with our day.
However, Artificial Intelligence has been created to generate any text. Students can get computer software to write complete essays, songs can be written to mimic certain artists and their genre styles, and people have even submitted full AI-written short stories to major fiction magazines like Asimov. It feels a little bit backward that we’re using something that has the ability to do so much of our work to give us more leisure and creative time as something to create so we have more work time. It makes me feel a bit odd about our trajectory as a creative in society.
This is not to say “Technology is Evil and Edison is a witch.” I’m writing this on my computer and I use technology in a million ways throughout my day. I think the question isn’t “should we have AI working in classically ‘human’ arenas?” but “How can we work with AI?”
With the rise of all the AI-generated art out there, I do worry about what it will mean for our future as a society. It’s easy to set up a program that will scan the internet for various features of paintings, analyze songs for musical patterns, and–yes–even write whole books based on a single sentence prompt. But what is the value of that? Without going into the ethics of copyright and ownership (which is a whole different subject I’m not qualified to speak on), are these pieces of ‘art’ worth our time? Beyond the novelty of ‘AI-Generated Profile Pics’ or something similar, how long will these endure the test of time? Will we be looking at these the same way we look at the Mona Lisa or The Birth of Venus? They’re cool tricks, but I don’t think they’ll ever properly replace human talent and creativity. In the future, it could exist, but I really hope humans don’t lose the passion to create ourselves when a computer can do it the same way. Will we be advertising ‘No Machine Novels’ or ‘Code-Free Art’ as an alternative? I can’t say for sure.
I certainly hope that we don’t lose sight of how writing binds us together as humans. We always talk about how humans are more ‘advanced’ than animals. Some people say it’s empathy, some people say it’s tool use, and some people claim it’s the moment we walked upright that sets us apart. Truthfully, I believe it is our ability to create and tell stories. From oral traditions around the fire and cave paintings to digital art and blogs, we have always been a species that thrives on the idea of stories and creation.
The truth is, we already use AI as writers a lot. A basic spelling and grammar check requires some amount of AI and there are all kinds of writing prompt generators out there that use formulas to derive everything from character names to ideas for novels. We have AI to help us edit our work into something more concise and comprehensive, we have software that can proofread our work. All of these things are crucial to any writer with a pulse. In my mind, we should use AI as a companion to our creative endeavors, not as authors.