I use AI in design work for generative fills. It’s mainly to pad out stock images so they can fit better in templates for socials and web ads. AI is also useful for getting rid of blemishes, red eyes, and other cosmetic adjustments. I’ve stopped using text-to-image for the most part. Our company wants reports for AI usage, but generative fills are excluded, and I’d rather not fill out the extra paperwork anyway.
Adobe Stock has a lot more AI-generated images nowadays, and we aren’t so keen on using them, because they have a kind of plastic sheen, especially on black people. There are ways to use Photoshop filters to add noise and speckle to make them look less perfect, but it’s mainly a last resort if we can’t find “real” people images.
AI is a really useful tool, but it’s no substitute for human talent.
I was open-minded when I first heard about the idea, but I just don’t feel anything that was created by AI. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t theoretically feel something in the future, just that I’m not holding my breath.
Have there been blind controlled trials studying people’s reaction to AI? Can they tell it’s AI? I’m curious about the reaction to AI art when the fact that it is AI is unknown.
FWIW, last year The New York Times conducted a blind “taste test” of AI-generated and human-authored passages. 54% of the 86,000 participants preferred the AI writing.
If it is great, or even just good, who do I praise?
If it is horrid, who do I condemn?
If I put up beautiful paintings in my house, should I be commended for my artistry, or my ability to buy things?
I’m interested in that link. I am already subscribed.
Fiction? Non-fiction?
I mentioned in another thread, I’m a romance writer, and I’ve read some bad romance, but a lot of readers don’t seem to notice it’s bad. Thousands of five-star reviews. And so there’s a pretty broad market out there for readers with no discernment, or at least willing to suspend their discernment for the sake of whatever these terrible books satisfy for them. I don’t understand it.
I think if I were to read a bad romance novel written by a human and a bad one written by an AI, it might be difficult to tell them apart. Which means a good portion of the general public will accept shit for entertainment, and possibly might even prefer it, especially as our attention spans and tolerance for complexity have evaporated.
I realize I’m talking about subjective things here but when I say they are bad, I mean they are lacking a lot of what would be considered in the fiction writing field to be foundational elements of craft. Structurally unsound, hamfisted character development, bad dialog, weak prose… And that’s effectively the same thing I’ve seen with AI writing. I can imagine an era where AI could get better, but what’s the incentive to create better things if people are already accustomed to and welcoming of utter tripe?
I noticed that the results have changed in the year that the poll has been active. Either people’s tastes have changed or there was an active campaign to change the results. The 54% of 86,000 readers result is from just two days after the poll went live.
Okay. I preferred AI roughly equally to human writing, though in actual fact, I hated most of the passages regardless of who or what wrote them. They didn’t really do anything. Just abstract navel-gazing. The only one I sort of liked turned out to be LeGuin. I suspect I would have liked all of them better with context.
This is key to the analysis, though.
We asked A.I. to choose an existing piece of strong writing and then craft its own version using its own voice.
This is not really allowing the AI to “write” the way a human typically writes. By modeling itself off specific passages of human writing, it’s allowing the AI to replicate multiple things that made the human writing strong, and really only altering the prose. That’s cheating. A lot of what makes writing compelling is its structure. If you take the structure of a written passage, copy that structure but just use different words to say the same thing, are you writing in the artistic sense?
A better comparison would be the original passage vs the AI corrollary.
It can be a good writing exercise, though. I used to do it as a young teen when I was learning how to write fiction. I’d take sections of a book I liked and rewrite them in my own voice. Sometimes I’d change the details to suit myself better, but it was the same structure and key events. There are elements of creativity there but it’s a crutch. It’s training wheels. It’s not the real thing.
But as I said, I think most of these writing samples regardless of author were obtuse and uninteresting. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last year, it’s that me and the New York Times have very different ideas about what makes good writing.