AI and Creativity

Hi, sorry for the long disappearance, it was not my intention, but life got busy and sometimes that's needed. But on with the blog!

Technology and creativity have a complicated relationship. While technology has been great from giving more tools to help us write stories, draw pictures, compose music and find inspiration, they've also become just as much of a distraction.

For example, artificial Intelligence.

AI has been a popular movie troupe for a good few decades now, with Hal from 2001: A space Odyssey, Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron and Auto from Wall-E being some of the most iconic movie villains in recent years. However, our views on AI have seemed to have changed recently. No more are they the robotic villains fed up with humanity's conflicts and trying to solve them, now they are being used for art, replacing humans, not by taking our places from life, but from our creativity.

These days it's hard to escape the influences of AI around us. With ChatGPT writing students essays and youtuber apologies, various apps creating song covers of famous characters from franchises like the Simpsons, Star Wars and South Park littering TikTok, and AI art exploding onto Twitter (or X, as it's now called) and in the opening credits of more recent Marvel TV shows, it's hard to deny the influence of AI. But how did it change? When did we go from being cautious of robotic intelligence to embracing it?

While some may argue that it's now allowing us to embrace our creativity more, that is clearly not true. A persons creativity comes from the person themselves, not from AI. While I may understand that some may not see their art as 'good' or a 'talent', all art is far superior and genuine when it comes from a person themself, rather processed by a robot after typing words into a chat box.

Now, this may be a stretch, but I believe capitalism may have a part to play in all of this.

From my experiences with capitalism, I have struggled facing perfectionism, a few times considering giving up if there wasn't a fast-paced alternative. But with AI, there now is a fast-paced alternative. And with fast, comes more options to make money. While writers, artists and musicians can spend weeks, months and often years trying to perfect their crafts to sell, AI can generate all that within, at most, hours. As some who has tried ChatGPT and other art AI generators out of curiosity, it's amazing just how quickly answers and art can appear from these sites. Do this multiple times a day, and you have a large amount of AI art to release. Unfortunately, there are several issues.

Not only does AI often allegedly steal from actual artists (I'll attach an article from The New Yorker about this below), but the art is does produce is heavily flawed. For example, awkward looking hands, wrongly placed shadows and unintentionally misdone facial features are just some issues that AI can do, botching the art completely sometimes. Though it is improving, these are genuine issues that can negatively affect art. While these issues can be done by human hand, it is much easier to redo or cover up the art yourself than try to explain it to a computer that may not understand.

AI not understanding is another issue. While it may be difficult to get across your ideas to other people, at least we can explain our likes and dislikes of the pieces to the people themselves, meaning that at least they can keep the positives and ditch the negatives without losing everything. On the other hand, how easy is it with AI, especially without losing the entire piece?

Overall, it is clear that the largest issues of AI creativity come from its overall lack of humanity and actually being alive. Everything that makes art art is the people who make it. From the earliest paintings of artists just starting out, to the final draft of experienced writers and musicians, all of what we create comes from our common understanding of our art, culture and each other which helps strengthen the beauty and humanity of our art. Humanity, which is the core of all our creativity, which itself is an extension of those who create it.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artists