Some Ramblings On AI And Creative Work

Here is a question: "what might be the ultimate effect of computers being able to mimic the creative and artistic process so well that learning the craft becomes useless (in the utilitarian sense of the word)?"

I've poured time and effort over the course of my (short) life into learning how to write well. If there is one skill I have tried to relentlessly refine, it is writing well.

While I've made money off it in the past, monetary gain has never been my ultimate aim. Never. What I seek, what I think I have always sought, is the beauty of clear self-expression. The ability to think deeply and express clearly. To say meaningful things about important subjects as I think about them. As far as I am concerned, writing is thinking. There are no distinctions between those activities for me because I am always thinking with a pen in hand. So to get better at one is to get better at the other.

So far I think I have mostly succeeded at getting better at writing. Never mind that the clearest evidence of my success was a WordPress blog I had for the better part of a decade and deleted in the rash grip of a depressive episode once upon a time in the abyss of suicidal ideation.

But, my relative success notwithstanding, I am worried about the future of creative endeavours like mine in the face of the relentless onward march of an ever-hungry, all-conquering god: generative AI.

We've already seen such a proliferation of AI being used to write essays, especially in academic settings, that it is becoming a norm. I already see students on the internet wondering how people went through school and passed before AI.

There is a sense in which this sentiment is not new. Time passes and technological capabilities increase and one generation is unable to relate to the experiences of the one before it. I too once wondered how people went through school before calculators.

But there is another sense in which this is entirely new. And this is the sense which ultimately matters if you ask me.

For example, a calculator for all its help is still just a tool. In order to solve a math problem, even with the help of a calculator I still need to understand the problem at hand. I need to work out when to divide and when to multiply, what to divide and what to multiply and so on, on my way to my final result. The calculator only comes in as a means of making the process of getting the result at each step easier. I am still fully engaged and involved in the solution of the problem.

With generative AI, the dynamics are entirely different.

All I need to do is enter a prompt and wait for the result. And if the result I get back is not satisfactory? I can simply click on regenerate and get a new result back in milliseconds. There is no engagement, no involvement, the entire procedure requires almost nothing from me, it is as passive as passive gets. And passivity is dangerous for the mind.

But this is not an essay about the dangers of passivity for the human mind. That's an essay I should write sometime but don't wait for my essay. Read Nicholas Carr's book The Glass Cage for a full treatment of the topic.

This is an essay about meaning on some level.

What does it mean in this brave new world to be a creative? To be an artist? A writer? A designer? A musician? To devote hours and hours to refining your craft. This while fully aware that an artificial thing, a cold, unfeeling, inhuman collection of 1s and 0s can now be prompted by schoolboys to produce the kind of work you do in seconds.

One thing that seems increasingly clear to me is that barring some intervention, this new frontier will be economically damaging for creatives. Why hire someone to teach you how to write or edit your work when you can just have AI write and edit it for you?

Will anyone really care that your song is 100% human-made and not AI generated in the future? I don't think so. And with AI able to generate music in an instant, while you agonise over a chorus for weeks, the ability to compete is simply non-existent.

Economically, it seems like creatives are walking into a future where the premise is: "if you cannot beat them, join them." Sell AI generated music and peddle AI generated essays, abandon your quaint, outdated nostalgia for human stuff and do what works.

And yet, creative endeavours derive some of their meaning from being labours of love. It means something that I am writing this essay, and thinking about what to type as I write every single word. All 1166 of them.

To be sure I am being aided by technology as I write. I am writing it on my laptop (and it is on the cloud) not with a quill on sheepskin so the possibility of loss in the case of an accident is near zero, all things being equal. And to be sure, typing on my laptop is almost certainly more comfortable than writing on sheepskin. Technological advance from quill to Dell has made writing in a sense, easier.

And yet, all this technology serves as mere tools which I direct to my own ends. At the end of the day, it I writing this essay. There is someone behind the screen labouring to make himself understood, to say something, to make you feel something about a particular topic. So that you may never have met me but at least now you know what I was thinking about vis a vis artificial intelligence on the 6th of June, 2024.

And this is what bothers me so much.

AI can already mimic humans very well in writing essays that seem human. The key word there is 'seem,' because while they may follow human patterns of writing, and obey all our rules of grammar, they are decidedly inhuman. BUT IT IS INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL!! And not only is it increasingly impossible to tell the difference, most people don't care about the distinction and will care less and less as time goes on.

When AI writes a paper about the effect of repressive regimes on their citizens, does it matter that there is no 'I' behind that paper? It is not a person labouring to make himself understood, to say something, to make you feel something about a particular topic. It is an artificial thing, a cold, unfeeling, inhuman collection of 1s and 0s whose inner workings we don't fully understand telling you what it thinks a person would say.

Does that mean nothing?