Comment Editor Lauren Henry discusses how artificial intelligence and its advancements pose a threat to many working artists and the creative industry as a whole
Artificial intelligence is nothing new. Many companies have been utilising these clever and responsive models for years now – individuals have had Siri on their iPhones since October 2011. We have been questioning our Amazon Alexas about the daily weather forecast for over ten years without a second thought. AI is incredibly useful and one cannot deny how it has increased the ease of our day to day lives. But is there such a thing as too easy? Have we started to get a bit too complacent as we rely on the crutch that is generative AI? What started out as a software used to aid us in our daily tasks has now morphed into a replacement for human ideas and creation.
Have we started to get a bit too complacent as we rely on the crutch that is generative AI?
This change is most noticeable in the creative sectors, with AI being used more and more to both replicate and produce art in all its forms. Just to clarify, I do understand how AI can act as a tool to many artists, allowing them to enhance both their final work and the creative process. There is no denying the help that these programmes can provide and, when used appropriately, generative AI can make the lives of many artists much easier. However, as these AI models become more advanced, they now pose a threat to many creative working professionals.
AI is being used a bit too readily, in my opinion. One scroll through Pinterest is all it takes to reveal just how often generative AI is being used to produce images that attempt to mimic painting or photographs. At its worst, AI is even being used to plagiarise the art produced by the careful hands of creatives, art that would have taken hours to produce now, copied and stolen by a computer programme in seconds.
Alas, it does not stop there. It is not just painters and photographers who can feel the damaging effects of generative AI, but also writers of kind – essayists, novelists, playwrights, and poets can all witness the bastardisation of their art form by artificial intelligence. In only a few minutes, you can have ChatGPT write you a short story or the script to a horror film, work that would have taken many writers months or longer. As AI continues to be trained, its scope only widens: many AI models can now compose music and create videos. Some can even alter pre-existing videos and insert the faces and voices of people who were never there to create what are now called ‘deepfakes’. No avenue in the creative industry appears to be safe from AI’s greedy grip.
Currently, this progression shows no signs of slowing down. In just 2019, the first AI-rtist was born by the name of Ai-Da. This ultra-realistic humanoid robot is a performance artist, designer and poet that can paint and draw using cameras in its – not her, this is a robot – eyes, alongside an AI algorithm and its robotic arms. Ai-Da was first debuted at a solo exhibition held at the University of Oxford, keeping the audience both captivated and fascinated by the novelty of it all. Despite being a robot, Ai-Da was designed to mimic the look of a human woman. Yet, I still find it absolutely terrifying. My discomfort goes beyond the ‘uncanny valley’ sensation I experience as I look into Ai-Da’s camera retinas, and is instead rooted in what this humanoid artist robot represents. Ai-Da is the physical manifestation of every artist’s greatest AI fear: that they will be replaced.
AI cannot mimic human emotion.
There is one thing that these AI developers have not considered, one thing that will forever protect the work and jobs of every artist – AI cannot mimic human emotion. No algorithm can imitate authentic feeling, no matter how hard it may try. Ai-Da’s brushstrokes will never contain the same care and attention as those of Picasso, or Van Gogh, or even just a child in a Year Eight art class, because an AI programme is not, and will never be, a living, breathing, thinking, and feeling person. AI cannot feel joy or despair, cannot experience heartbreak, cannot show empathy or compassion, and so, none of these emotions that define the human experience can be translated into the art it produces. These emotions that are expressed through the art of many are what we as an audience connect with; it is the raw humanness of the artists that they can convey in their work that makes it so special. And ChatGPT just cannot compare to that. Its intelligence is artificial, after all.
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