English exams back in high school were especially unpopular. For more than a few students in my class, it involved mugging up answers to commonly asked questions from the syllabus. Since I was in a school under a central education board, the syllabus was common throughout the country… which meant that guidebooks were present aplenty regardless of your subject.
I was brought up to read on a daily basis, so an English exam was simply more of the usual for me, and certainly for some of my peers. We were already reading something or the other, so sparing maybe 30 more minutes to read just a bit more was nothing out of the ordinary for us. In a sense, we never put in the extra effort to prepare for English since we were inherently doing that.
I remember being a little… disappointed, almost, seeing some of my friends take out guidebooks mere minutes before our exams began. It was a bit incomprehensible for a child to realize that what was enjoyable to him perhaps wasn’t quite the same for others. Reading the material myself enabled me to draw my own conclusions, my interpretation of the content. The subjective questions I faced were simply opportunities for me to express myself. The idea of letting someone else dictate what I “should” be writing was just… not it for me. I couldn’t understand why someone would buy such a guidebook, and yet I’d wager you’d find one in so many schoolbags regardless of the school they’re in. Today, of course, I wouldn’t be quite as disdainful. You do you, friend.
This little act of independence had a cascading effect on my personality, all the way up to the present day. It instilled in me a sense of the satisfaction one can get upon experiencing a piece of art for themselves. No undue influence, no voice in your ear telling you what it is you see in front of you. It’s why I took up photography and writing, amateur though I may be.
Art begets art, after all. Maybe they won’t be masterpieces, but they will be unique expressions of creativity. For some, that is all that matters.
Of course, this piece isn’t about an attitude I had back in high school. Bear with me for a bit here.
In 2022 OpenAI released chatGPT, a simple interface for anybody to interact with what could only be described as a technological marvel. Instead of trawling through websites trying to find answers to obscure questions, you could simply get AI to do it for you since it would probably have already done the trawling. Instead of reading travel blogs and watching Youtubers, you could have your own travel itinerary generated in mere seconds. You could get snippets of code when documentation was sparse, you could use AI as a tutor to understand concepts that were otherwise too time-consuming. The list is endless, but… not all of these use-cases were quite so straightforward.
Once the generative AI revolution began, it quickly spread outside the realm of text, to images, audio, even video. Models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s own DALL-E leapt to the forefront, giving anybody access to generating images of their choosing in mere minutes. You will remember the absolute avalanche of “Ghiblified” images taking over social media.
Some incredibly smart people found a new area of research. Papers after papers are being written, pitting LLMs against one another, trying to understand how well they understand languages, how they deal with biases, how accurate they truly are, how efficiently they perform their computations. The Math behind these LLMs is complex, but both you and I know it isn’t because of their technicalities that they’ve taken the world by storm. It’s the ease with which that complexity is made accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
AI entered the realm of children’s books, with “authors” using programs to generate soulless pieces of text, accompanied by equally soulless “illustrations”. It greatly sped up the process of publishing a book online, with a few keystrokes you would have something Amazon would be willing to publish on its online stores.
Instead of using real-life people for shoots, or even regular stock images, people took to AI to generate images for marketing. Even the gym I frequent is guilty of the same. Surely they know the end result looks significantly worse than what they were doing previously.
In a more well-known example, Marvel’s Secret Invasion used AI art in its opening sequence. One of the largest franchises on earth chose to give money to another company instead of simply hiring actual people to work on an intro. And you know what? The result shows.
People are creating AI therapists now, with the aim of fixing a broken, expensive system. The intention may be noble but you have to wonder if this is actually going to help people who would benefit the most from therapy.
I haven’t even begun to talk about the other, more prominent side effects of such a technological leap. A force has been unleashed with barely any guardrails apart from the most obvious ones.
Let’s go back to what I wrote at the beginning of this piece. My little high school anecdote hopefully makes a little more sense, now.
For the longest time I held the belief that making and experiencing art is a core part of the human experience. The music you listened to were stories you heard through your headphones. The movies you saw were messages on your screen. The books you read were not just stories, they were written by people exposing their innermost selves on the page.
Some truly monumental pieces of art have been created when we united with that singular purpose.
And then generative AI entered the fray and put all of that at risk.
Instead of thinking about how AI benefits us, we need to spare a moment to think about how it perhaps negatively affects our lives. Think about the amount of effort, equipment, training, practice every artist does to have the confidence to portray themselves out there. Every piece of text that’s been written, every piece of clothing that’s been designed, every house that’s been built, every song that’s been written, every painting that’s been done, every photo that’s been taken. All of these are unique, because the people who made them are unique. They’re unique because each of their lives have been different, and they found a medium of expression through whatever art form they chose.
Due to the simplicity of using AI, all of the above is at risk of not being valued the way it should be. When the world looks at the bottom line, anything that impacts it negatively or doesn’t maximise it will simply be cut off. So what if AI generates abhorrent trash, regurgitated countless times? So what if it is inconsistent, ineffective, or even inaccurate? The technology lets it generate “passable” content at much lower costs, which is… really all we need to say. It’s not an ideal state of affairs but then again, it never was. Social media brought about societal changes for better or worse, and it seems that it is only happening again with the rise of generative AI.
Anybody has the right to call themselves an “artist” now. Surely thinking of an image of the river at sunset is the same as actually going there, setting up your camera, waiting for the perfect amount of lighting, and then processing it in post, isn’t it? Of COURSE thinking of a children’s story featuring a bear and a thief with a moral at the end is the same as actually thinking of the characters, the setting, the dialogue and the plot.
I of course disagree, but the amount of people who agree, or are willing to not disagree with this is far too high for anybody’s good.
AI is going to add another barrier for entry-level artists looking to make a living for themselves. Instead of getting to work on background characters or little bits of copy here and there people will opt for computers to do the same, further devaluing creative expression.
We have always used art to express our experiences in this world. When you let computers do that, what remains?
I will leave you with this fantastic piece to cap things off.
