ChatGPT and other expert systems like it are amazing and taking the world by storm. While they have their uses I also think they have their dangers. Not Skynet dangers (for this), but rather something more existential. The loss of creativity.
Nick Cave (musician) wrote about this eloquently and in the video below Stephen Fry reads that letter. I think it sums up the perils of ChatGPT (and others like it) to creativity very well.
There is no question for this post. Just something I wanted to share and, maybe, a topic for discussion.
Until we have superintelligence that is just MUCH better than people in every creative endeavour, all this means is that creative people learn to AIs as part of their process to create even greater works.
There’s no doubt AI is going to disrupt the chattering classes like mechanization disrupted farm labor. They’re going ro squawk loudly about it, because they are the chattering classes. Farmers lose their jobs? Hey, that’s progress. WE lose our jobs? A THREAT TO HUMANITY!
Barring Skynet kinda stuff I think the notion is a threat to art (using the word broadly).
We see teachers worried about their students using AI to write their papers. We see it being used to create pictures (and other art). The video in the OP is about this. About creating art.
Will the human race end because of AI in the humanities? No.
That said, it seems like we are losing something as a society here.
I don’t buy it. The existence of ChatGPT doesn’t stop creative people from exercising their creativity just as they’ve always done. Maybe other, less creative, people can now produce similar works without the effort previously required. If those products are actually superior to human-produced art, then so what? The fact that all through history almost every artist in existence has been aware that there were better artists alive did not stop them from creating their art.
The invention of cars and trains did not invalidate or replace human runners, the invention of photography did not destroy human painting as an art form, and the existence of computer chess engines did not end human chess play. I remember dire predictions that the game of Go was finished when Alpha Zero beat Lee Sedol in 2016, but at the time I thought that was nonsense, and still do. Alpha Zero has invigorated Go like nothing else has done in the last 2000 years. I expect that in 100 years humanity will look back at the emergence of AI as the beginning of a renaissance in the history of art.
New mediums are not the same thing as a machine that can produce content in a given medium.
Playing a computer that will beat you every time in Go or Chess is not the same as playing a human.
Currently, AI is only derivative and not truly creative. It is riffing off the creativity already out there but not making anything genuinely new. Could today’s AI have conjured up the musical “Hamilton” or “The Lord of the Ring” novels? I think not.
If AI can only work off what already exists then it can’t really produce anything new.
Sure, humans can still produce unique art of whatever sort but fewer will be making it as more grow-up with the crutch that is AI. If you want to be a good writer you need to write. Painters need to paint. And so on. More will rely on AI to do the hard work and the body of art all humans create will be diminished.
No, everything has not been done. There are endless variations, combinations, novel points of view etc. to be utilized. But to say Hendrix, or Picasso, or Nabokov didn’t stand on the shoulders of giants or didn’t spring off from what already existed is folly. YMMV.
Also, novelty and quality have nothing to do with each other. So no-one is saying 50 shades is on par with Lolita.
I don’t believe ChatGPT will deplete humanity of its soul, so there’s no need to panic.
AGIwill deplete our souls, however. But, the good news is that we probably have another year or so before the inevitable collapse of human civilization.
The question is, what will we collapse into? It could be something bad, like evolving into an Idiocracy Society—a post-apocalyptic world of chaos and perpetual stupidity.
On the other hand, we may evolve into something good—a post-apocalyptic world of plenty…and perpetual stupidity. We’ll become a Morlock/Eloi Society, where AI are the Morlocks and we are the Eloi.
I don’t know about you, but I welcome a life of hedonistic pleasure while lounging about eating grapes from the vine all day long. Doing that while hooking up with someone like Weena sounds like a good life to me.
Sure, there will be the worrisome inconvenience of avoiding human sacrifice to appease the AI overlords. But, you won’t need to outrun the AI, you’ll just have to outrun your neighbors.
A friend sent me sample of a fantasy novel he had been working on with ChatGPT help. To me, it didn’t have any soul, and went from point A to point B without any signs of struggle or insecurity that weighs down everybody going through even a mundane life. The teenaged heroes battled the monsters without any sense of danger or strife.
There was no sense of humor, either. It was paint by numbers. Fill in this plot hole with this color. It was the Scooby Doo gang going directly to the villain and pulling off his mask.
The Morlock AI will be underground running machinery and making provisions for us. We, the slow-witted Eloi/humans, will be on the surface leading seemingly idyllic lives, until the AI send their killer-bots to the surface to grab the slow-moving humans and bring them underground for evil doings.
