AI art and writing - an opinion
AI is dangerous. Not in a Skynet, Arnold robots standing on our skulls kind of way, no it's much more insidious than that. AI is coming for our art, our literature, our poetry, our education, and worst of all, our online biographies. With the easy accessibility of AI interfaces like Chat GPT and MidJourney, anyone with the ability to bash a few keywords out on a keyboard (presumably with their fists) can “create” art and writing, and then fill the internet with it. It's the online equivalent of United Utilities flooding our rivers with human excrement and poisonous chemicals. You can ask an AI to give you an image in a particular artist's style, or write an essay, book or poem on any subject, in any style, without researching it yourself or bothering with troublesome things like learning grammar, checking facts* and engaging in original thought.
“Calm down Grandad!”, I hear you cry in between TikTok videos of teenagers making omelettes, “It's not dangerous, it's the future, you have to embrace it.”
The danger of embracing it, like so many people are, is that it instantly devalues human creativity. It devalues all art and writing by removing the need to pay someone who has spent years honing their abilities. A new generation is growing up with any image or combination of words available instantly at their request, without having to learn or develop their skills. It's fast food vs artisan bakery. Sure a few smaller places might survive making chilli and garlic sourdough boules but the vast majority will be using AI Greggs and AI McDonalds.
Artist and writer friends I know are already noticing a drop in commissions, because why would you pay for someone to draw a horse on a skateboard (yes, why would you?) when you can just type “Horse on Skateboard” into Midjourney and get any number of images you want.
Also, AI works for the most part by trawling through the vast amount of human input on the internet. What happens in a few years when much of that information is also AI created? It's one thing to have an AI trained on thousands of years of human art, learning and literature, and even then the products are questionable. In a few years the internet will be saturated with AI content, and AIs will base their output on other AI output and it'll become self propagating. All we need then is an AI to do our internet browsing for us and we can all go and enjoy a nice sit down in a park somewhere.
Even presuming that we won't all give up trying to compete, since it takes a human artist or writer a number of days, even months, to produce something really nice, as opposed to an AI that can spit out fully rendered portraits or whole books in minutes, the balance will soon shift. But does it matter? Isn't it just the same as the industrial revolution, machines doing manual labour jobs cheaper and more efficiently than humans, putting a few people out of work but benefitting mankind as a whole? No, it's completely different, this is ART, this is human endeavour, this is the base of joy that we find from delving into the human condition and finding different new, fresh perspectives on how a horse can ride a skateboard.
 |
AI struggles to separate fact from fiction, it doesn't understand subtext and juxtaposition, and it's not good at pretending to understand subtext and juxtaposition like most human artists try to. Case in point – I was sent a couple of links today to AI written online articles about me. They were full of a bunch of accurate information, mostly picked up from Wikipedia and interviews, but it also had these gems-
Russell Payne is ranked as one of the most popular Bloggers.
“Most popular”. I probably write about two blog posts a year lately. A few people read them. I'm related to most of them. Honestly, I'm surprised you're reading this. I'm surprised anyone is.
Russell Payne entered his career as a Blogger in his early life after completing his formal education
I finished my “formal education” in 1987. My first published blog was on the BBC in 2003, 16 years later.
My height is 5ft 11inches.
This one hurt. I'm 6ft in bare feet.
My net worth is $17.3million.
It really isn't.
Russell Payne who brought in $3 million and $5 million Networth Russell Payne collected most of his earnings from his Yeezy sneakers.
I've never owned Yeezy sneakers. I had to Google what they are.
My mother is Glenda Jackson
I asked her, she isn't.
Now I know me, and I know these facts, but anyone else reading that webpage, except possibly Glenda Jackson, would probably take them at face value. And that is why AI is so very dangerous - it's stupid enough to think I'm a popular Yeezy wearing dwarf blogger with an Oscar winning Mum. Stupid enough to not know fact from fiction, but powerful and prolific enough to saturate the world with that same content. And bad art.
Avoid it if you can.
My commissions are open.
Hire a human today.
*this blog post was written by a human, any factual errors are deliberate and actually a clever way of making a point.
