It became clear in my research and communication with artists on this subject that there are two scenarios cascading into the creative community – often, the two are imperceptible. These are the application of AI technology by artists themselves, in the way that a designer employs Photoshop or InDesign; and then there are the companies using the referential material of artists’ work, to generate copy and paste style graphics. As Natalie says, “The thing I fear the most, is AI generating the style of artists. I think there needs to be education and discourse around how we can protect our work as artists, while not allowing fear to be a barrier to exploring AI as a methodology in our practices. It is bigger than us, but we need to find ways to cultivate that AI can be actually useful and not harmful.” Designer, photographer and artist Koos Groenewald undertook his own process of diving into AI as a way to quell his own anxieties, explaining, “I mostly knew about all of this superficially, only the top layer of noise, and this recent rumbling of noise made me super scared. Before getting stuck into it, it just seemed like AI could basically do anything that we as artists, designers and writers can do, and so it would obviously replace us all by the end of the next year. After joining the MidJourney Discord and navigating the initial confusion – I actually got super excited. It’s just so damn impressive what it can do in basically no-time. Especially if you consider what people my age had to do in ad agencies to make comps of people doing things, bad stock libraries and so on – all those days of work in seconds, really.”
With the spirit of curiosity and open mindedness, Koos soon realised something which I had not understood yet myself – that AI as a technology for creative pursuits, still a requires highly skilled artist, “With this excitement I messed around and tried to copy some of the famous AI artists to see how ‘easy’ it is to create ‘the work’. With some better and worse results – and made me realise that the artists using the AI are still super skilled and that the best ones take time, skill and originality in creating and guiding the AI. I then had big stars in my eyes because I had a massive illustration job to start and I assumed Midjourney could easily create the brief, a ‘Fictional Utopian Future city-scape of Amsterdam’, for me to work from – but after 4 hours of trying to get it, I really hadn’t gotten anywhere useful or useable and realised that, ironically, if I’d just drawn for 4 hours I’d probably have been done by now. So for now my job feels safe – and like all tools it still needs a creative ‘wrangler’ to get certain and required creative results. As long as humans are the audience the human ‘touch’ is a valuable translation, I think when the AI starts making art for itself then maybe – damn – then who knows what kind of fucked we’ll even be? I went from scared to excited, to disappointed, back to scared but also realistically excited. I guess it weirdly also made me see how much AI has been in our lives already with less outrage, which makes this feel reassuringly like an evolution.”
Koos’ experience speaks to the source of the fear, perhaps, for us who are outside of AI and particularly those of us outside of the tech industry; these are unknowable terrains that present multiple timelines and outcomes and with such little relative agency that we all have in an ever-changing, hyper-fast timeline – what happens if and when AI is no longer a system that needs human beings? Tim Jamboula, an innovation consultant & disruptive technology researcher, with an extensive background in AI – comments that this fear, and our inability to comprehend it, is precisely the point of why AI can exist so impactfully in our lives, “our brain does not operate, work, or think exponentially. We, human beings do not have the ability to comprehend the full extent of exponentials. AI from now on, with all the data it has at its disposal will accelerate technological and human progress in various ways, within just the next 2-5 years. An imaginary vision of the state of the world by then is hard to fathom, due to our inability to process information exponentially.” While this may be exciting, Tim and other experts in his field believe that legal due process such as lawsuits, are actually a necessary building block to the regulation and streamlining of AI as integrated into our lives, saying, “as much as it brings forth great opportunities, it, like everything else, gives birth to new challenges, we as a society have to face. Of course, we will need regulations to counter IP rights and further infringements, or other ethical issues. The new Bing + ChatGPT fusion will most definitely lead to further lawsuits down the line, once website owners or bloggers or others do not get as much traffic onto their websites, as they used to. Deep fakes, digital identity thefts, and fake news among others are topics that are going to be of serious concern. Hence, regulators need to increase their efforts in comprehending this disruptive technology faster than before, in order to regulate it with clear boundaries. Besides, AI is here already. It regardless will affect all our lives. Thus posing the question of how to prepare for it?’’
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