Will the new AI rob creators of their copyright? Or will it liberate human creativity into unprecedented levels of invention? The debate is open
Warning: tHE Above film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
We’re trying to track the current AI eruption in a consistent way - in that we’ve always hoped that radical technologies will enhance our imaginations and our communities, IF we can devise social and personal practices that harness their power.
We are interested to watch the AI dimension of the artists and writers’ strike in Hollywood, where strong arguments and even law cases are being brought against Generative AI. The complaint is that the software has been trained on a vast internet archive of material made by living artists, writers, performers and illustrators, available on the web. And that the startling productions made by an AI like Midjourney are the outcome of a great, vastly automated copyright rip-off.
Famous actors are now worrying that their contracts will start to ask for possession of their “virtual” selves in perpetuity - where the actor can be near-perfectly simulated by AI tech, even beyond their life (see the “young” Indiana Jones in the current movie).
We’d prefer to step back from this. Hasn’t the potential to mix and morph content been a structural possibility from the beginning of open digital culture? Haven’t artists “stood on the shoulders of giants”, meaning related to and drawn from past and present creators, as a normal element of their creative process? Given our extreme lack of resources, it would be difficult to make the Daily Alternative as effective as it it without a “fair use” approach to content from other places.
What we’d like to see happen is the possibility of new arts and creativities arising from the form-making power of AIs - breaking the ceiling on human imagination with its combinatorial power, instead of fearing that it will replace creators.
So to the artwork embedded at the beginning of this blog - Hysteresis. As the associated post at Psyche says:
Born of technical innovation and bold artistic vision, Hysteresis is, in part, a confrontation of our overwhelming AI moment. In a work built in collaboration between the experimental artist Robert Seidel, the electronic musician Oval (Markus Popp) and the queer performance artist Tsuki, an amalgamation of lines, shapes and colours morph and contort, building eerily beautiful abstract forms that seem to flicker out of existence as soon as they take shape.
The form of Tsuki’s body and movements are, in some instances, clearly visible and, in others, seem only to be hinted at, as if her figure is moving between dimensions or inhabiting a haunting dream. The glitchy electronic soundtrack underscores the uncanny atmosphere, emphasising the blurry border between what’s human and what’s machine made.
The details of how, exactly, Hysteresis was built are almost dizzyingly complicated, involving a self-echoing interplay of analogue and digital inputs. Live projection, original drawings, machine learning, dance and music all play a part in the final product.
But in the same way one needn’t understand musical theory to enjoy a song, Seidel’s dazzling exploration of authorship, technology and creativity can just as readily be appreciated as a dazzling and visceral aesthetic encounter – one that hints at a transformative moment in human creativity, and an unknowable future.
We were also helped in our musings by this piece from Sheena Iyengar in Time magazine, which goes again the current resistance to GPTs and LLMs as threats to creativity. An extract:
Now let us imagine the future of creativity in a world of generative AI that enables us to map choices as never before—to explore exponentially more combinations of choices, compare and contrast infinite approaches at a glance, and constantly test new ideas.
As the brilliant French mathematician Henri Poincaré once said: “Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to choose.”
AI will not necessarily come up with our best ideas for us. But it will greatly reduce the cost—in time, money, and effort—of generating new ideas by instantaneously revealing untold options. It will enable us to efficiently discard the “useless contraptions” that cloud our vision and identify useful combinations previously unseen. It will empower us to broadly and efficiently canvas an incredibly vast range of domains to pull relevant knowledge from unexpected places.
If used properly, AI will ultimately help us seed far greater innovation throughout our society.
More here. Iyengar cites a study which purports to show that countries in which all powerful chess robots were used, tended to generate more creativity in human chess players.
This final piece from The New Yorker—when staff writer Kyle Chayka’s corpus is fed into a new program, Writer, which aims to mimic his style—shows how the exercise of being a “centaur” with AI, can be an occasion for genuine self-improvement:
You can ask ChatGPT to mimic a particular writer’s voice, but it rarely gets close. Writer, by comparison, can be unnervingly effective. At times Robot Kyle seemed to be reflecting fragments of my mind back at me, mimicking some of the semi-subconscious tics that constitute my writing.
It wrote, for instance, that generative A.I. “asks whether the meaning of language is still rooted in the human experience, or whether it is a commodity to be mined and manipulated, a tool to be used in whatever way the artificers of this new technology choose.” In this sentence, I find several embarrassing hallmarks of my writing. First, there is the preponderance of commas, with sentences segmented into many clauses, a habit I partially blame on The New Yorker’s style.
Then, there is my personal penchant for setting up dialectical contrasts: “rooted in the human experience” versus “commodity to be mined.” (A book editor of mine once forced me to weed out some of the many “rather”s in my draft manuscript.) Finally, there is my tendency to end a sentence by echoing the final thought in different words: “a commodity . . . a tool.”
The generative text evokes a feeling in me not unlike the revulsion of hearing one’s own speaking voice in a recording. Do I really sound like that? The robot has made me acutely self-conscious. I recognize my A.I. doppelgänger, and I don’t like it.
As far as “insight extraction” goes, though, Robot Kyle is less successful. Most “insights” that the program produced felt hollow or approximated. Reading the generated sentence above, my (human) editor might point out that something “rooted in the human experience” can still be “a commodity,” and that the noun “artificer” is unnecessarily grandiose.
Unless I told Robot Kyle not to cite anyone, the program would fabricate source quotes, like commentary from a nonexistent “Dr. John Smith, a leading AI researcher at Harvard University.” Most vexing, the program fell back frequently on cliché—“in the end,” “remains in flux,” “the long term implications . . . are still unknown.”
No matter how many times I asked it to describe how I felt about being replaced, Robot Kyle always came to the conclusion that I would ultimately be happier as a result of my A.I. self. The program’s output reminded me of the fragility of language and original thought. As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patterns; avoiding them requires active effort. Robot Kyle is no different.
More here. And see our archive on AI.