Ask a writer – or an artist or musician – what they think of AI and there’s a fair chance they’ll wax apoplectic. But I really don’t think it’s anything to get our knickers in a knot about, and here’s why.
The usual argument goes like this; I work my creative juices to the bone to produce my art. Then bloody AI prances along, scrapes it off the interwebs, and uses it to compose its own masterpiece! I never gave it permission to use my intellectual property, and now it’s pretending it can do my thing better than I can. Down with the machine!
Well OK, you know who else is using your intellectual property to compose stuff? All of us. Writers can’t write unless they’re readers and every artist bases their work on the foundation laid down by other artists. How is this different to what AI does? Are we outraged when musicians list their ‘influences’ or writers their literary inspiration?
It’s different, they’ll say, because I’m using my unique human creativity to bring forth an original work, while AI is at worst formulaic and at best plagiarism.
But isn’t three quarters of Amazon Kindle’s stock in trade just as formulaic as any AI creation? We complain of AI slop, but most of the slop being peddled as fiction is, to be brutally honest, human slop. At least the AI gets its grammar and spelling right, in general.
Bottom line, we’re worried AI will put us out of business. But if our creations are indistinguishable from, or worse than what AI can produce, then we should be out of business!The best artists and writers will always be better than AI, so let’s drop the outrage and focus on being truly, humanly original.