The human hand behind machine creativity
“…perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which?” — Nick Cave
It might be the most contentious debate I’ll see play out in my lifetime (and I witnessed all that mask/no mask, vaccine/no vaccine business). Intelligent machines that are also “creative”. And which seem to be threatening human creativity, especially for those of us who make a living from our art. In a few words, someone can conjure up an amazingly detailed digital photograph or painting using AI models by Midjourney, DALL•E, and others. They can use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write a story in any style. A lot of users are also experimenting with AI’s ability to mimic human artists, photographers, designers, authors, you name it. We’re not exactly thrilled about this. (Nick Cave is fuming.)
At first glance, this is a terrifying time for artists. Who knew we would be the first to be replaced by robots? I honestly thought AI was coming for the janitors and factory workers first — and anyone who enjoys driving.
But it makes sense, I guess. What better way to ignite public interest and enthusiasm in complex technology than to give it shape and colour and texture?
Creative AI has literally captured our imagination. (Sorry, had to.)
Like with all new technology — especially things that make creation easier and faster — opportunists have swooped in to make a quick buck. That side of things is always pretty disheartening.
But again, like with all innovation, standout talent is taking its rightful place.
Some AI artists worth a curious follow: The Latchkey Kidds, Loop, Swoop and Boop, and Waxy Fruits. These are real human minds using AI as a tool to bring their own ideas into being. Human eyes discerning artistic value. Human hands excitedly revising, adding detail, and making changes in Photoshop. Latchkey Kidds’ creator is a traditional photographer who is now exploring a totally new side to her work. Waxy Fruits used to be a traditional toy designer and is now creating ‘memories’ of retro toys that never existed. I’ve only been following Loop, Swoop and Boop for a little while so I’m not sure of their story, but I suspect they have some kind of background in interior design. Ethical issues aside (we’ll get to them shortly), I think these guys are making an exciting case for AI as a creative tool, just like Photoshop and Procreate.
They say you can’t fight progress, and yet part of me really, really wants to. It’s the same way I felt when Procreate changed how we make art. I wanted to stay in my dark little corner with my worn down pencils, ink and nibs, forever roleplaying as a medieval scribe. But I can’t imagine not having Procreate now. Even when I’m not using it to draw, there are a hundred ways that it helps me to create. From being my infinitely modular idea scratchpad, to giving me a safe space to explore new ways of making art.
This would be my hope for machine creativity, if we really must have it.
But as it stands, there are some real problems with the way AI is trained. One is the fact that it uses without permission art created by real human artists to spit out its ‘original’ AI content (Molly Crabapple wrote a damning article about that). Another is that human content moderators are needed to filter out the nasty words and imagery before the end product, and the way these people are treated is alarming to say the least. Outsourced workers screen hours of disturbing and violent content every day, for just under $2/hour. (The revelations will have you shook.) Meanwhile, OpenAI was just valued at $29 billion. The trope of “evil AI” makes a great smokescreen for companies that can’t even hide how little they value human work.
That’s right, the AI content we’re so feverishly consuming right now… is unethically sourced.
(Meta is just the same, by the way, making me wonder if there’s some kind of ‘vegan social media’ I could migrate to.)
Call me old fashioned, but I want to see more humanity in my artificial intelligence. I want to see human imagination respected and human work valued. That means companies taking more responsibility for this creature they’ve unleashed into a clearly unready world. Giving proper credit and dignity (and maybe even compensation, see here) to the people on whose backs they are building the future of AI. And being accountable to the present, even as they push forward doggedly into the future.
Some people find Nick Cave a bit melodramatic, but he laid out the current scenario very clearly: “ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”
The key is in that last part — the devaluing of human experience. And we’re doing it to ourselves. Marketing has turned us into demographics. Social media has turned us into content consumers. AI has turned us into data points. No amount of model training is going to turn us back into human beings. Only we can do that.