Of what value is the smart, creative thinker in the modern world? Are we needed about as much as hostlers and fountain pen repair technicians? After my prior comments on AI (A Creative’s Capitulation to Generative AI, or How I Became Darth Vader), I feel compelled to write about it once more, especially since Mary and I are on the road again and so it’s time for a new blog post!
Education and AI
After wonderful visits with our grown children in Wisconsin and Florida, we are now heading for Knoxville to visit grad-school friends and perhaps walk around the University of Tennessee campus where Mary and I met and began our journeys in life all those years ago. In pondering my own education, I can’t help but think about how education has changed since then, from the go-go years of everyone should get a college degree until today when people wonder if higher education is even worth it at all; from the years when the best preparation to compete with machines in the workplace was to strengthen your creative thinking skills until today when AI seems to threaten every creative job from writing to research.
AI is certainly transforming self-publishing. The true problem with AI is not that it is terrible and produces garbage that will flood the world with AI produced stories and art. No, the true problem with AI art and writing is that it is already, even in its infancy, so threateningly, terrifyingly good. And so pervasive. I know first hand that Microsoft, Adobe, and Meta are actively pushing AI products and you have to be really diligent and aware to avoid embedding them into your work inadvertently. This web site where I publish my blog will push really hard for me to let it “improve” my writing with AI, especially to shorten my sentences, paragraphs, and text sections. As I’ve written before, I have no interest in reading AI literature or viewing AI art. But would I even know it if I were?
There are a lot of people out there who are comforting themselves with the false belief that they can “tell” AI work. What wishful thinking. Even if they can recognize it now (which most of them can’t), they won’t be able to soon. Let me tell you about two little experiments with the primitive “baby” AI already available in the past year.
I was talking with my 14-year-old grandson about AI art this past winter, and he expressed the confidence that he could “easily” recognize AI generated book covers and art. I felt a bit skeptical of that claim, so we arranged a challenge: I sent him 28 pieces of art and book covers, some AI generated and some not, for him to identify. His challenge was to clearly do better than random guessing (which meant getting 8 or fewer wrong). Sadly, he got 12 wrong, a little under half. Not better than random guessing. My grandson took it like a true scholar, “Welp,” he said ,“Live and learn.” Not everyone is so quick to learn, unfortunately, continuing to believe they can do it even as it becomes ever harder to do.
I did another challenge with a subset of my TYGRCOF proofreading team. Our goal was to write a 100-word or so story opening and post it for feedback from the group. Everyone suggested a strongest and weakest point for each opening and then picked their favorite two openings to provide a bit more feedback. Secretly, I added ChatGPT as one of the writers (yes, I did have to beg my Team for forgiveness).
Can you guess which story opening got the most “Likes?” Yup. ChatGPT’s. It also did pretty good at offering on-target feedback, albeit perhaps focused a bit more on standard “good-writing” tropes than a human would offer. Here’s a touch of black humor from the activity: ChatGPT criticized one opening on the grounds that it felt generic and not like the author’s own voice—ChatGPT generously offered changes that would make it sound more like the author’s voice! Isn’t that ironically, horrifyingly, funny!?
In retrospect, did the ChatGPT story opening lack a special “something?” I think so. I thought the writing was too vapidly engaging, stirring high-stakes interest with a flurry of words that, on examination, said little. Another writer participating in the challenge found the AI work to read a bit too “commercial,” feeling more like a cover blurb than an authentic opening. Regardless, the AI piece hit all the right buttons for emotional engagement, high stakes, compelling tension, forward momentum, exciting action, and even a SF mystery.
Maybe experts can still tell AI art and literature from human work, but not for long. And if the masses can’t tell them apart, and even prefer the AI, where does that leave the future of creativity? How can I encourage young people to strive and struggle toward creative achievements when an AI can do it nearly as well, or even better by some measures, in seconds? Where does that leave the future of the traditional “liberal arts and sciences” education that encourages creative and evaluative thinking?
Science Fiction, McCarthyism and AI
There is a great deal of opposition to AI in the science fiction community at the present time—for example, many ARC readers that I have solicited to review my work declare that they will not read anything with AI contamination. There is good reason to be concerned about AI in my view, but a cancel culture approach may not be the best route to take to express our concern. Cancel culture is not a new thing—it has existed for as long as there have been humans. I’m using “cancel culture” here to mean activity where large masses of people make judgments without true trial (so the innocent can get caught as well as the guilty), where extremity of guilt is not considered (so mild infractions get the same response as severe crimes), and where opportunity for redemption is largely absent (so the guilty have no real incentive to change). For example, the McCarthyism of the late 1950s was a type of cancel culture, ruining lives by mere accusation of something that some people found objectionable on political, economic, or moral grounds. There was nothing wrong with people having concerns about the particular form of communism that was spreading around the world at that time. The problem was that many of the participants in McCarthyism never really recognized the self-serving nature of it (benefitting Senator McCarthy) or its moral wrongness (guilt by accusation that ruined lives with no room for defense, redemption, or even meaningful conversation about which aspects of communism were objectionable and why). This is not unlike the modern AI cancel culture within the SF community. I myself have been caught up by it, with people dissing one of my book covers because they considered it AI generated (it was not). This kind of “activism” offers little meaningful opposition to AI since it is applied so indiscriminately. An educator friend at my church once said “It’s not the things we don’t know that are a problem—it’s the things we DO KNOW that are WRONG!
Always an Optimist
My greatest concern with AI is not its power to stir McCarthyism, or its environmental impact due to high energy use, or the disruption of jobs, or even the challenge of re-configuring our long-standing models for wealth distribution if economic production by AI vastly outstrips human productivity. My concern is that art, including literature and film, is more than entertainment—it is an essential mode of communication. Even “escapist writing and film” are, in fact, packed with perceptions of identity, purpose, values, and meaning of life. I don’t want to read AI regurgitations of human thought even if it is technically better writing, or even more entertaining—I want to read human thought. I suspect—and hope—that others feel the same.
Maybe, indeed, AI will soon be engaged in solving the interesting and challenging creative problems of the world, doing art, literature, science, music, medicine, economics, and engineering, on our behalf. Maybe humans will only be needed for task related work that the AI find uninteresting: welding bridges, laying electric lines, cleaning toilets, all important work but not necessarily the work that attracts many creative thinkers. But even if that is true, I still encourage young people to think, create, and strive toward a life lived in the pursuit of excellence. Even when the professional ball player can play softball better than us, should we stop playing? Even when the star musicians can make better music, should we stop singing? Even when the world is flooded by books and ideas as good or better than ours, should we stop writing or thinking? It is in the struggle to do better that true creativity is born, not in rearranging words to sound good and appeal to the masses. It is in conceiving ideas of our own and sharing our inner experiences that we join the long tradition of human thought, not just in creating ideas that are commercially successful. It is what we do ourselves that makes us human, not merely the consumption of material created by others. And maybe, just maybe, if we give it all we’ve got, we will be able to compete effectively with AI after all. Remember, no AI can ever experience being human, and that gives us a big advantage!