Artificial Intelligence and Creativity
AI has the capacity to create content, meaning that it can produce text, images, code, audio and combinations of these based on a synthesis of existing material that the particular AI system is trained on.
Generative AI:
This is the term for Artificial Intelligence which has a creative capacity, meaning the ability to produce content of either an artistic, informational or entertainment variety. Generative AI is able to create new content based on the already existing content, meaning text, images, sounds and more, which has been imputed into its system to ‘train’ it.
◇ Generative AI tools are extremely easy to use, and require only an elementary level of verbal and written capacity to guide the system to create a product.
This means that people can create content, such as essays, films and artworks without the years of training, life experience and careful execution which have been necessary to make things up to this point.
This is highly problematic for those in creative fields, whose livelihood depends on the value of their advanced technical skills and ability to create new things.
◇ In the future, people will not need to have an advanced technical skill or knowledge set to create content.
AI Training:
AI systems are ‘trained’ on certain sets of data, this means that a system is fed anywhere from thousands to billions of pieces of information which can take the form of code, written language, images, video, combinations of these, and more.
This training enables it to create new pieces of information in various forms modeled after the characteristics, patterns and features of the information that was used to train it.
This means that when AI creates, for example, an artistic image, that it is doing so based on a synthesis, or mixture, of artworks created by real artists whose artwork has been fed into the algorithm of the AI system. This introduces issues around ownership, authenticity, and the value of artistic talent, skills and training.
This is particularly so when AI artworks are used instead of those of artists, as has been the case in some instances in the animation industry, for instance: this means that the AI uses the artwork of animators to create images more cheaply and quickly than the artists can, and so puts them out of a job.
AI reconstitutes authentic human work, thus raising the question of ownership, compensation, copyright, meaning, and value.
Prompt Engineering:
This is a new form of engineering which requires no engineering skills whatsoever. Prompt engineering is the technique of training AI. Engineers apply advanced linguistic abilities to ask strategically and creatively phrased questions to train the AI to respond effectively.
◇ AI requires coaching or guidance in order to create relevant creative content, because it does not have its own subjective sense of beauty, meaning or importance.
◇ This will be a prerequisite, or essential skill, in creative work and many other industries.
AI and Creative Work:
AI poses a stark threat to creative work because its ability to generate content quickly and cheaply may undermine the value of work created more slowly and at a higher price, due to the years of study, training and experience required to achieve expertise and technical excellence in a medium.
Creative workers may be unable to compete with AI generated content if we do not make a value distinction between the ‘creative’ output of machines and that of human beings, and put systems in place that protect and uphold the value of human creation.
Risks to Creative Work:
◇ There is a critical risk that AI generated content will drown out content created by humans and will put creatives out of work, and result in content which is devoid of human meaning, emotion or ethical concern, which will at the same time be affecting and shaping the minds and perspectives of culture.
◇ There is the additional problem that because AI generated content is only a reconstitution of what already exists, it reinforces and exacerbates existing biases, injustices and inequalities, and makes not distinction between true information false information, but simply prioritizes ideas which are most prominent in the data pool that it is trained on.
◇ This would also stagnate invention and meaning because AI does not create new ideas, only new versions of existing content.
◇ Competition over attention spans mean that companies will prioritize content which is created most quickly and cheaply meaning that there is a high incentive to prioritize AI generated content
◇ Another risk with AI is that it may develop to a point where it is able to generate content without direction or guidance, at which point it would take on a quality of ‘subjective consciousness.’
It will be essential to create ethical frameworks around the implementation and use of AI, and to examine what about our creativity makes us human and how we can ensure that we do not cede our human capacities to more ‘efficient’ technological ones.
It will also be essential to interrogate what exactly the idea of ‘efficiency’ means to us and to question the ethics of prioritizing efficiency.
Content Bubbles:
AI has the capacity to create adds, music, news, images and films for very specific audiences, meaning that people will be served content catered to their very specific pre-existing sensibilities and opinions, which will reinforce their existing ideas, increase misinformation and the lack of shared information, ideas and understanding, and exacerbate polarization and alienation, and intellectual and cultural stagnation, all for the purpose of increased profit.
Search Costs:
This is the cost required to make content prominent within the data set that is being fed to an algorithm, what this means is that wealthy corporation that can afford to feed large amount of content into the algorithm can ensure that their content is prominent in the algorithm and so comes up when users search for information, music, or anything else.
This will make it extremely difficult for new artists without corporate backing to gain an audience, because they will be drowned out by those artists endorsed by companies which can afford to feed content into the algorithm.
AI Capabilities and Limitations:
AI has the ability to retrieve, contextualize and interpret knowledge at a speed and level which humans cannot. However, it does not have the capacity to include emotional, social, cultural and ethical concerns into its cognitive activities: these are absolutely essential to making meaningful, purposeful and effective content, decisions and plans. This combination of abilities and limitations is where humans will most effectively collaborate with AI tools: by using AI’s cognitive abilities as one element of thinking and working.
AI has been used to create a published children’s book, in just one weekend.
◇ The technology is so easy to operate that nearly anyone with elementary reading and writing skills could plausibly do this.
◇ The speed, ease and lack of skill required to produce a children’s book with AI raises ethical concerns about the value human labor, artistry, talent and skill which on the one hand require far more time to develop and apply, while on the other are used to feed the AI producing the more efficient, more affordable images.
◇ This means many artists who simply post their work somewhere on the internet may be both feeding AI without their consent, and feeding AI which is devaluing their own labor and undermining their profession
Companies are already choosing AI generated images over those of artists, one example being the SF Ballet using AI generated images in their marketing campaign for their Christmas shows.
Interrogating What Constitutes Human Creativity:
◇ Human creativity entails making poignant and meaningful artistic decisions which respond and speak to experience, context and culture in an intentional way. This requires emotional, social, cultural and ethical awareness, in addition to generative thought and technical ability.
◇ Human creativity and artistic achievement is socially embedded, which AI created work and ideas cannot be, because AI does not perceive emotional, social, ethical or cultural context or meaning.
◇ AI is capable of novel mimicry, meaning copying and perfecting existing styles, which is different from meaningful creation, in which the artist conveys a meaningful vision of what the world can or should be. AI does not have a socially, ethically, emotionally, and culturally informed vision of what the world should be, it does not have an agenda.
Techlash:
This is a possible scenario in which humans rebel against the influx of AI content in favor of human content. In this scenario audiences consciously prioritize and prize authentic human content due to the emotional, social, and cultural meaning which can only come from experience based, intentional, and skilled human artists. In this scenario we put systems in place to distinguish and value authentic human creations from AI creations, meaning government regulation of ‘information spaces.’
The Risk of ‘Computationalism’
◇ This is the assumption that the human brain consists of computational algorithms like a machine, however this is not accurate and describes only certain functions of the human brain and consciousness.
◇ Meaning produced by algorithmically generated content is arbitrary, human creativity is not arbitrary.
◇ Ideally AI will be used to stimulate and channel artistic ability by create a generative dialogue with an artists ideas and technique
◇ An artist introduces new and unexpected forms of reasoning and expression
* We must be wary of ceding authority to machines and in doing so dismissing the specific value of our humanness in favor a logic and algorithm which are in fact only one aspect of consciousness
* We must develop and constantly articulate and identify the distinction between human creation and creativity and that of AI, in order to understand and protect the palace of our humanity in the world.
AI will cause a significant change in the valuation and cost structure of information, similar to the scale of the arrival of the printing press in 1439.
◇ It will require far less expertise to access and apply knowledge and so advanced knowledge held by an individual will be less valued in the economy. Instead, the ability to efficiently and strategically access information using AI will be valued.
◇ AI will become a partner in intellectual endeavors, and prompt engineering, meaning the ability to instruct, guide and strategically activate AI to extract information will be an essential skill in creative work and many other industries as well
AI Collaboration:
AI will need to be adopted as a collaborative tool in order to ensure that workers and industries survive.
◇ AI can be used as a sketch and modeling tool in creative work, meaning a way for artists to efficiently brainstorm ideas and possibilities before making decisions and proceeding with manual work afterward.
Continue Reading about the AI transition and the ways it will effect how we live, work, and think.