AI-ssues

I keep starting this post, and reality keeps overtaking it, so I’m hoping what I write remains pertinent by the time you read it.

As far as the issue of so-called AI “creativity” (art / music / writing) is concerned, the genie not merely escaped the bottle but the bottle got sent to the recycling plant and converted into a cell phone.

Sold by the genie.

AI is here now and there’s no dodging that fact.  It won’t go away, it isn’t going to collapse the way cryptocurrency and NFTs collapsed.

(Actually, what collapsed was speculation in cryptocurrency and NFTs; the underlying blockchain technology that made them possible is still being used by banks and businesses in a non-speculative manner.)

AI already impacts us (i.e., both the public at large and creators in particular) so we might as well look at the implications.

AI devalues talent, skill, and knowledge

When asked, I tell people I can be considered an artist only insofar as I put marks on paper and a cartoonist only insofar as people can guess what those marks represent.

What I lack in skill and talent, however, I somewhat compensate for by learning from far better artists who demonstrated what makes certain artistic approaches better than others in given situations.

That makes me a pretty fair art editor because I can identify a problem on a page or in an illustration and explain it well enough for the artist to correct.

This is different from telling AI, “No, do it again.”

A human artist working for an AI prompt taskmaster would go insane, effort after effort rejected, being told to try and try again until the boss is happy.

That actually happened when I first started working at Ruby-Spears Productions.  Joe Ruby bounced scripts back with nothing more detailed than FIX -- MAKE BETTER scrawled in red ink on the cover sheet.

AI creativity lowers the bar for human beings in all fields.

In fact, it lowers it so far as to make it flush with the floor.

Many AI prompters suffer the same mindset as the various suits we needed to deal with when creating shows.

People with the ability to veto, but a complete lack of vision to steer a project or the competency to course correct if needed.

And I’ll repeat what I’ve said elsewhere: I have no objection to AI creativity as a toy or a game, or using AI to fill in blank spots in a human executed project.

But as been demonstrated, AI doesn’t even require human beings to create finished product from scratch, not even to the most rudimentary point of coming up with a basic idea.

Not all people dream or imagine equally. 

A significant portion of the population can’t mentally visualize anything.

Ask them to think of a horse and they can’t picture the animal in their head.

Most other humans conjure up some vague image of a horse, anything from a faint hazy outline or a somewhat cartoony image, but some can imagine a horse in photographic detail.

The same applies to all other human creative endeavors.

We are not all equal in the distribution of talent or the mastery of skills.

One can make the argument this is unfair, and from one perspective that’s true.

But eradicating all minimum standards may not unleash human creativity so much as hamper it.

For a big part of the 20th century, people presumed everyone dreamed in black and white.

Turns out this was a direct result of humanity adapting motion pictures and television as a primary form of visual input.

Until the late 1950s, most motion pictures released in the world were shot in black and white.

Color television didn’t become prevalent until the late 1960s / early 1970s.

For much of humanity, their dreams became limited by what they saw.

AI imagery may very well shape our culture in ways we cannot comprehend at this moment, not just in obvious ways such as subtle commercials and product placement, but in how we process what we view in the world around us.

AI images don’t merely devalue human talents and skills, by “creating” based solely on what has been done before, it undermines the development of new ideas and modes of expression.

Currently the most popular music of Spotify was recorded over 20 years ago.

The market for new music shrank when people could begin accessing anything they wanted whenever they wanted it.

The business model that made the promotion of new music profitable is being done in by an audience who only wants to hear what they always heard.

The same applies to films and other forms of creativity.

The financial model for film makers is currently best served by endless sequels / remakes / ripoffs.

It is possible to make a feature length film for just a few hundred dollars using iPhone technology and apps, but except for streaming services like YouTube or PornHub, very difficult to make enough to break even.

Mind you, in very many ways this is a good thing, return creativity to its amateur status, motivate by the desire to express ideas and moods, not to earn enough to live on.

But that’s the rub, ain’t it?  How do we keep creative people creating and not wasting their time laboring for pennies on non-creative / non-productive schlub work that does no one any good?

(And bit by bit the schlub work jobs will get replaced by AI as well, so what do we do then?  Marx may get the last laugh after all.)

AI devalues identity

One huge problem racing towards the major corporations like a runaway freight train powered by Saturn 5 boosters remains the issue of copyright / trademarks / fair use.

If I draw a cartoon of Mickey Mouse making a satirical statement of some sort, I can get away with it under what’s commonly considered “fair use”; i.e., the right of any creator to comment on the work of another creator in what is called a “transformative manner.”

That’s what I do with my illustration fictoids:  I take old advertising / pulp magazine / comic book / etc. illustrations and add (hopefully) funny captions to them, typically changing or subverting the meaning of the original. 

This is what MAD magazine did with their famous movie and song satires.

It’s what porn does when they release XXX-rated versions of hit films.

It’s what Weird Al does when he parodies pop music.

It’s long been considered a legitimate artistic / creative expression -- only it’s never been fully vetted in court!

Nobody ever officially drew the line.

Disney infamously went after the Air Pirates -- a scruffy band of underground comix artists in the early 1970s -- when they released their second Mickey Mouse comic book parody.

The House of Mouse claimed once was fair usage, but twice infringed on their copyright and trademark, and they subsequently prevailed in court.

But even though they won a substantial punitive penalty against the Air Pirates, the House of Mouse didn’t dare collect because over 80 other underground comix artists vowed to do their own one-shot parodies of Mickey if Disney didn’t let the Air Pirates off the hook.

Rather than endure a tsunami of Mouse-related porn parodies, Disney agreed not to collect on the legal judgment  against the Air Pirates.

If 80 scruffy underground cartoonists could intimidate the House of Mouse, how can they stand against literally millions of AI prompters?

AI devalues emotion

AI images aren’t created by cutting and pasting elements of different works together.

Rather, it analyzes a vast repository of images and breaks them down into different categories representing different values.

A picture of a banana, for example, contains information of the shape of a banana, the color, the surface texture, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

And not just simple basics like “bananas are yellow” but exactly which shades of yellow, the hues as it ripens and rots, and enormous number of distinctive informational bits that AI can breakdown faster than a human being could.

Prompt AI to do something different with it -- “Show me a five day old pink banana” -- and it will search and combine all those elements with the new required information.

A creative human mind does exactly the same thing, only it seems instinctual in comparison because we do not break down every image we encounter into hundreds of distinct data points even though we recognize those data points subconsciously.

This is where human emotion adds value to a work.

The challenge for the trademark owners cited above is that in its sampling, AI can take all the elements that make a trademark or brand identity recognizable yet put them together in a manner that differs enough from the original that make infringement difficult to prove.

AI can issue an endless stream of knockoffs in blinding fast fashion, easily overwhelming and subverting the original IP’s identity and value.

Currently AI never responds twice to the exact same prompt with identical output.

This is a bug that will be addressed shortly; you want the ability to stay on model from iteration to iteration.  Coming up with the ability to say to AI “take this particular character and have them ride this particular bicycle down this particular street” will make sequential story telling far easier.

Right now AI images -- regardless of apparent skill level -- are as artistic as a Rorschach ink blot.

As one wag observed when astronomer Percival Lowell and others claimed to find canals on Mars, the canals were doubtlessly the product of intelligent beings, the real question resting on which end of the telescope those beings sat.

As noted above, AI deals card until it delivers a perfect hand.  Each card in and of itself is no different in value than any other card in the deck.

From AI’s point of view, 52 jokers are no different than a regulation deck.

The value of any 5 cards rests entirely upon the value human beings place upon it.

Different games with different rules present different values, even when using the same deck of cards.

In many ways, AI images -- and stories, and music -- are no different from those mass produced paintings one finds in home décor stores.

“Oh, look at that one, with the nice big orange sunset.  That will go just lovely against our teal living room wall.”

There’s nothing wrong with that, you’re certainly entitled to decorate your home in a manner that pleases you.

But there’s nothing unique about it, either.

AI is the 21st century version of Bob Ross 

It’s fun, it produces pleasing works, it gives the minimally talented and woefully underskilled a chance to feel creative.

But it ain’t art.

Bob Ross deservedly stands out today as a popular pop culture icon, but I challenge anyone to name a single painting of his that’s memorable on its own.

Those paintings of his that sell to collectors do so as artefacts of the man, not as works worthy on their own.

AI can do many things well, but they’re all surface, not substance.

It has a brain…

…but no heart.

© Buzz Dixon