I’m definitely feeling a current mood amongst creatives that AI isn’t really adding anything to the mix. At the moment, the technology seems to be like a small baby taking its first clumsy steps. We are amused for 10 seconds at the novelty of the most powerful learning machine in the world, but can’t help worrying about the potential of what that new entity will become. I guess the question for all of us, is where will we sit in a world where we will be able to summon the output of all the world’s most talented artists at the click of a mouse or voice instruction? I think history may show us the way.

Technology is there to make difficult tasks easier. We were promised that AI would do the difficult, tedious, labour intensive, jobs that sap our time and energy. But instead we are the ones stuck doing the chores and AI is doing the fun stuff. This can’t be sustainable. History would suggest that when a technology alters our lives so completely for the better, it enjoys almost complete adoption, but the past will stubbornly remain if we feel we will lose something.

AI is making some of our lives better but at the moment, also worse. This will lead it to a situation where many of us will utterly reject it in all its forms. Art is about the struggle, our interaction with basic materials, paint, canvas, sound, musical instruments.. It teaches us to enjoy the process, not be fixated by the output. That’s something that just occurs when the artistic endeavour ends.

There are some of us that persist in using older technologies because we don’t believe the replacement is a worthy successor. Classic cars, vinyl, CDs, mechanical watches, guitars. The craft, the materials, the form are revered and hence preserved over and above the newer supposedly better replacements.

Scientists, engineers and philosophers have already predicted that AI will become so powerful that everything we know will eventually be controlled by a super being entity. At some point they will transgress being simply software and hardware and being organic synthetics, and then into elemental all knowing forces free from the constraints of bodily form. We need to hope they are benevolent.

However to make that transition they need our input, to feed from our knowledge, to understand the values we hold dear.

As long as there are still enough of us that value art and the process of making it, things might be OK.

AI and the brain

(Image: Leonardo AI created with the prompt, “A brain generating thoughts about the future.”)