A little while ago, I wrote an article about moral panics and the way our society creates bogeymen to scare ourselves. One of the current big bogeymen in the arts world is, of course, AI. There is a lot of discussion as to whether AI is going to decimate our creative industries.
There is no doubt that AI is capable of some amazing things. In my own limited experience of experimenting with the Bing and Grok AI tools, I have generated poems and other text, enhanced photographs and even created images and short video clips.
Recently, a friend played me an AI-generated arrangement of a song he had written. He fed the AI tool a demo recording of an acoustic guitar and vocals by him and his late wife. The tool returned a complete song arrangement featuring a full band, string section and lead and backing vocals. It was very impressive and for a moment the doomsayer in my head began predicting the end of the music industry.
On reflection, however, the situation may not be quite so dire. At least not yet anyway.
Following my visit to my friend and listening to his AI-generated music track, I started to be increasingly aware of AI-generated material all around me. Suddenly, it seemed like every event I saw advertised online had AI-generated promotional images. I spotted AI-generated posters in my local shops and elsewhere. Things that I read sounded like they had been written with the aid of AI tools.
Why was I suddenly noticing so much AI use? A cognitive bias known as the frequency illusion has a lot to do with it. Once you become tuned in to something, you start to notice it more and more. However, something else may also be at play.
If you think about it, AI-generated content tends to look and sound like AI-generated content, doesn’t it? We have all seen the AI-generated photographs with distorted features and extra limbs, or just with that “uncanny valley” look about them. AI-generated poetry tends to have a sameness about it. Even my friend’s AI-generated music track, amazing as it was, had a soulless quality to it.
The reason for this is because of the way artificial intelligence works. The AI models are trained on vast amounts of data in the form of text, images, audio and so on. All of that data is indexed, analysed and catalogued by the system.
If you ask the AI model to generate, for example, a picture of a lion, then put simply it looks through all of its reference images of lions and, for want of a better term, “averages them out” to generate a new image. This image then joins the pool of lion images in the data bank. The next request for an image of a lion will include this image in the average. Remember, the AI is not creating anything completely new, it is merely using its existing content as a reference to generate something similar.
Over time, as more and more AI-generated images join the data bank, so the “average” image will be more likely to have features from these images. This means that over time, AI-generated images will increasingly have the “AI look” and be identifiable as such. Same goes for text, music and whatever else we may be using AI to create.
Over this past weekend, I visited an Artists’ Open Studio event in Santa Cruz County. I was blown away by the sheer variety and quality of the art on display, created by people of all ages and from all walks of life. Only human beings, at least so far, have the ability to create something completely original that expresses human emotions, that truly stirs something in the heart of the observer. For the foreseeable future we will still at some point need a person to be the driving force behind creativity, whatever tools are being used.
What will the future of AI bring? It is anyone’s guess. Everything that I have written in this article is based on the current state of existing technologies. What the future developments will be are at this point unknown.
So much speculative fiction has been written about artificial intelligence, robots and the like, and much of it is terrifying. Sometimes it seems like the people at the forefront of these technologies have never read a dystopian science fiction novel or watched a film like The Terminator.
Will AI eliminate jobs in the creative and other industries? Undoubtedly. Are we right to be concerned about its capabilities and possible impact. Absolutely. I will be watching the continuing developments and debates with great interest, and hope that someone will always have a steadying human hand on the steering wheel.
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