Creativity during the Rise of the Machines
Growing up in the late nineties and early 2000s, I lived through the formative years of the internet. I remember a time before cell phones were commonplace, before WiFi was everywhere, before self-driving cars and autonomous vacuums. I remember the boom when technology really began to work its way into our everyday lives, and when scientists made huge leaps in development and suddenly machines could do a million things they couldn’t do before. But, mostly, I remember the fear.
Believe it or not, before the days when everyone and their dog had a smartphone, society was afraid of the long-term damage using a mobile device could cause. There were smear campaigns claiming that talking on a cell phone was the equivalent of holding a microwave up to your head. Movies were themed around robots and how dangerous they were, how we couldn’t trust them. Our way of life was changing, and the masses didn’t like it. So, I’m really not surprised that it’s happening again now.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has made huge improvements in the past few years. We use AI more than we think, with predictive text and chat-bots and smart watches, AI is all around us. Most of us didn’t have a problem with it before, so what changed?
They had to bring art into it, that’s what.
Social media has recently adopted some really interesting AI technology, from generating AI portraits via phone camera to generating an image from user-inputted prompts. As advanced AI technology is becoming accessible to most of the population, one question keeps popping up fear, concern, and curiosity: if AI can make art now, what do we need artists for?
For clarity, when I say ‘artist,’ I mean it as an all-encompassing term. Writer, painter, sketch artist, musician, digital artist, etc. AI has been used to fill all of these roles and while some of the products aren’t very good (even hilariously bad), some could pass for a human touch. It is conceivable then that, eventually, AI creations will reach a point of perfection that no longer requires humans to make consumable art. That has a lot of people scared that they’re going to lose their job, but fret not. There are many reasons why humans will always be needed in creative spaces, and I’m going to cover a few of them here.
First things first, and the easiest thing to quantify, is the legality of AI-generated art. Artists are more than a little familiar with the term ‘copyright,’ for better or for worse, and we’re going to talk about it again now. Does anyone remember that monkey-selfie debacle a few years back? A certain (delusional) animal rights activist group took a photographer to court on behalf of a monkey, claiming that the selfie the monkey took with the photographer’s camera was the intellectual property of the monkey and the photographer didn’t have the rights to it. The whole thing was ridiculous, but it did provide us with an interesting standard. The activist group lost the case, as it was deemed that copyright could only be held by human intelligence.
That definitively excludes AI.
As of right now, AI-generated art cannot be protected by copyright laws. That’s a problem for major studios, so I wouldn’t expect to see fully AI-generated movies or books hitting the shelves any time soon. Sure, laws can change, but that’s speculation and there’s no point to pull your hair out worrying about what the court may or may not do in the future. Instead, let’s focus on another factor preventing a complete AI takeover.
People don’t like change. That’s no secret, and it’s always going to be true. If you look at any sub-genre of art, like painting for example, you’re going to find people who are intensely into modern, innovative pieces. You’re also going to find die-hard fans of neo-classical, renaissance, mid-century, and older. It doesn’t matter how far into the future we get, cave paintings will always be revered by some. Maybe not all, but enough. That’s how I view the current landscape. Human-made art will always have a certain appeal that a machine just can’t achieve, even if it’s entirely psycho-somatic on the side of the viewer.
AI might (eventually) be able to compare to human creativity, but we’re not there yet. And, if/when we get there, that doesn’t mean that humans will lose their place at the table. Humans are incredibly adaptable by nature; we persevere and adjust and survive until we can thrive. AI is simply another advancement in our society that we need to integrate.
Technology may not be going anywhere, but neither are we.
