The inception of artificial intelligence has brought both praise and frustration. From a business purpose or technical purpose, AI has shortened the distance between ideas and products. AI has filled the knowledge gap in many situations to allow individuals to continue in the flow of their ideas to completion. The same can and can not be said on the creative side of the house. Individuals have spent lifetimes improving their craft only to be surpassed in an instant by an AI bot.
From the business and technical side, AI has introduced individuals to a level of information access that was previously difficult to parse. Researching thoughts and ideas would require hours of traversing through search results and lengthy text to find what you were looking for. With AI, that has been properly trained, it’s as simple as asking a question. The only issue comes down to how well the AI has been trained. At todays level, it’s pretty darned good, and as time goes on it will improve exponentially.
The same goes for technical design. If an individual is interested in assembling a website, for example. That individual would need to research the necessary coding languages and processes, then apply that knowledge actually build the website. With AI you can simply ask it to write the code for you. In it’s current standard it may not always be 100% right, but often you can use that same AI to help resolve issues that do not work.
From the creative side AI has been trained by looking at millions, if not billions of existing artwork. Learning and understanding what each pixel represents and why. It tries to breakdown the artwork and then duplicate it to learn how it was created. In it’s current for AI understands that when it sees a hand that it means an appendage at the end of an arm with a couple longer appendages off that. It does not fully understand the anatomy of a hand, how it work, and even that it should have 5 fingers. However it learning with each image generated. Taking the information provided to correct the issue and storing it for use later. With each image created it gets more and more accurate. With that said a painter would take years to gain the knowledge and tough to create a high level image, where as an AI can complete one in an instant.
The stigma that comes with AI generating art is that human artists feel that the training of AI on all their art they’ve posted to the internet or made public is theft. That the artists should be compensated for that knowledge that has been consumed by the AI. The part that is missed, or conveniently left out, is that human artists have done the same thing to get where they are as well. The difference is the scale and speed in which the information is consumed. Artists build on their craft over time. They have learned how to approach art from predecessors. Artists who learned from their predecessors as well, and so on. When viewing and mimicking the artwork of other artists to develop their own art did they compensate those artists for the knowledge gained from looking at it? No, they didn’t.
The rub comes in the fact that AI can complete the same learning process in seconds that a human would take years to do. The learning process is done in the same manner:
- Look at the existing art.
- Learn how it’s done.
- Try to do the same thing with a different topic.
The statement that artist will be replaced by AI is false. Just as books were going to be replaced by computers. Will it affect how they are consumed going forward, yes, but evolution in the ever changing world has always been a thing we humans need to adapt to.
There also lies the issue of ethics. What are the ethical implications brought about by this AI agenda? There are biases that are formed by both the AI and human contingents. Along with a greater contingent for discrimination as AI lacks the thought processes associated. There is a lack of accountability or transparency of sources. There is also broader questions about the role of AI in society and the potential impact it could have on human well-being. These are all beyond my scope.
In the end, we will need to see where this goes, as I’m sure there will be deep discussions on the AI agenda.
