I may be turning to the dark side.
Let me explain.
Generative AI has exploded into our world, and, as a writer and philosopher, I have significant concern about how it will impact my creative contributions. I work hard at my writing, including short stories, novels, and essays, grappling with wording, flow, and content. The whole point of writing is that the ideas are my gift to the world, the words are mine, even the connection from one thought to another is mine. I DO NOT WANT my thoughts contaminated by an AI, because it is my thoughts, not AI thoughts, that I have to give away!
I even reject the use of MSWord grammar check when writing my novels, and will no-doubt ignore the corrections suggested by my host server’s AIs concerning this very post (yes, I know it is coming) telling me that my sentences are too long (80% of your sentences contain more than 25 words, which is more than the recommended 25%), that my paragraphs and topical segments are likewise too long, and that my key phrase is not repeated sufficiently frequently or evenly throughout my essay. No doubt I’m turning away readers right and left, but, by golly, the words and style are mine (and you can know they are not AI because AI don’t make those mistakes!)
However, it takes me a year to write and edit a novel.
What if an AI can do it in minutes, and, because it’s been trained on the most popular and successful stories of all time, it will do a better job, or at least a job that far more people prefer?
Now extend that to art, music, science, and basically all creative innovation. Humans can just sit around on the beach drinking Piña Coladas (non-alcoholic of course), and living the good life, right?
I would hate such a world even if humanity were able to solve the problem of wealth distribution that such a world would create. I want to have creative input into my world, and generative AI has the potential to make that unneeded. That terrifies me.
We aren’t there yet. Right now, you have to nurture the AI along, tell it what you want and help it focus when it goes in the wrong direction. But for how long?
A Hugo winner at the Seattle Worldcon that I just attended commented that her field of book cover art is undergoing existential terror. Yeah.
But, at the same time, my niece, an artist well known in the fanfiction community, tells me that she likes AI for its potential to extend and expand her artistic abilities.
So, will generative AI increase or decrease human creativity?
The answer to the question, of course, is ‘yes.’ Generative AI will decrease (usurp?) human creativity in some areas, but make new opportunities in other areas (true at least for the current state of AI capability). But will the new areas outweigh the loss of the old? I don’t know.
Turning to the Dark Side
So, given all of my reservations, why in the world would such a noble Jedi as me turn to the dark side?
Because, I have just discovered that generative AI allows me to create art, and better art, than I would be able to otherwise do. I have always created my own book covers for my self-published “contemplative writings” work (Ordinary Man Books). Mostly I use my own photos, and the covers are fairly simple. Recently, I began work on the covers for a couple of contemplative short story collections and realized that my vision for creating scenes from my own stories exceeded my artistic abilities. So, I played around with Adobe Firefly, combined with some other image editing tools, just to see what I could do. It allowed me to implement my artistic vision when I would not have been able to do so otherwise. I really liked the result! Suddenly, with a little help from Firefly, I can imagine scenes from my stories and bring them to life!
I haven’t decided yet whether to use my book cover efforts or not. Although I really like the result, I’m an amateur at book cover design, so what would I know? Also, AI cover art Is held in very low esteem in the science fiction community, and, although Firefly was trained on licensed and paid-for artwork (unlike some generative AI trained on work without permission), and my effort deprives no artist of work since I was going to create my own covers regardless, the negative attitude in the SF community doesn’t really take any of that into account.
I have other reasons for hesitation. Yeah, maybe I’m ok with allowing generative AI to help me implement a vision for a piece of artwork that I lack the artistic skill to otherwise create. However, I can imagine that someone else might feel the same way about writing—that they have a vision for a story but not the writing chops to implement that vision and AI can help them. I’m quite uncomfortable with AI input into writing.
The message of a story is carried in the writing, not just an overall vision. It is through the writing itself that I communicate with the reader. My contribution to writing is in the line-by-line way that I tie ideas, characters, and philosophies together, making it truly my step-by-step thoughts, not merely some grand vision of a story. I don’t want my writing polluted by AI and, what’s more, I don’t want to read stuff that is coming from an AI that has simply been trained (perhaps without compensation to creators) on all the writing that came before it! Even if technically very skilled at writing, an AI is still just a machine, regurgitating, in some way, what it’s been fed.
But wait! Although it’s true that an AI bases its creative generation on work that came before it, that’s no different from me! As I ponder how to write an acknowledgement for a novel, I realize that my own contribution is not solely my own but is influenced by every book I’ve ever read and every person whose life has crossed mine, including parents, siblings, teachers, friends, colleagues. Even strangers.
So I, too, have learned from both the masters and the common folks who came before me.
Out of the Bottle
The AI genie is out of the bottle. We can’t go back, however much this old-codger heart might want to. But I think we should be very careful and thoughtful in going forward, and not simply be driven by the economic need to move faster than the other giant tech companies. Such reckless progress could be both dangerous and unjust.
However, the economic drivers of AI advancement are also out of the bottle, aren’t they?