Hit the Books with Dan Milnor: AI and the Creative Self
As we creep toward the latter stages of 2024, you would be hard-pressed to find a more poignant topic than artificial intelligence. AI has already begun to permeate our lives. Fitness tracking, music playlist suggestions, healthcare, customer service, security cameras, and more, and by all measures, this is only the beginning. Nearly thirty percent of Americans claim they interact with AI daily, but almost forty percent say they are more concerned about AI than excited by it.
And for those of us in the creative fields, AI is front and center in the conversation about the impact this new technology will have or is already having. AI platforms have already led to controversy in things like photography contests, where winners have admitted to using the technology to manufacture images instead of capturing them with a camera. Most creative teams use AI for copywriting and content creation, but what impact does this have?
AI and creators
There is talk that AI will replace us, or most of us, anyway. If the algorithm can write, create, design, and fulfill, then why do we need humans? But perhaps we are looking at this in the wrong way.
Artificial intelligence is, as the name implies, artificial. Our world is messy and imperfect but filled with arbitrary rules in an attempt to make sense of it all. With new technology comes the need for a new ideology. Instead of us versus them, the AI mechanisms, perhaps it’s still us versus us. When we invented artificial sweeteners, did we throw away the sugar?
AI certainly brings with it a range of difficult questions. As a creative, I am faced with these daily. What if Dan Milnor prompts AI to “make something in the tradition of Dan Milnor.” What are the results? Art? Visual plagiarism? A rabbit hole of no return? All the above?
How do we protect ourselves and our work from being consumed by the algorithm? Or should we even try? If I use AI to create imagery that is designed, in part, from your work, then how can I complain that you are returning the favor? If we prompt AI to make something in the tradition of a legend, what right do we have to use that work? And what if we prompt the algorithm to create something of our liking only to realize the result is even better than what we could imagine? Is it even ours at that point, and does it matter?
The ethics of AI
You could say that artificial intelligence is the most significant moral and ethical discussion of our lives, regardless of industry. But at the core, at least for now, is the term “artificial.” There is a difference in the struggle between prompting a painting to be made and mixing your oils by hand. There is no smell to the keyboard and no texture to the digital interface. Tangible, real, actual, imperfect, and vulnerable is what makes humans human. Artificial will add but perhaps not replace.
In 2016, Lee Sodol, one of the world’s best Go players, battled with AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent system designed by a team of researchers at DeepMind, a London AI lab now owned by Google. The AI system dominated Sodol until the fourth game when he played what is now referred to as “the divine move,” or “God’s Touch.” Sodol proved there was something intangibly human that the algorithm didn’t possess. A unique flavor of genius that may or may never be replicated.
We humans are part of the natural world, not the artificial world. Fingerprints, snowflakes, fractals, ripples, spheres, spirals, crystals, or natural patterns of unique organization.
It is too early to tell where AI will take us, but it is up to us to move slowly with knowledge as our guide.
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Dan Milnor is a pro photographer and creative ambassador for Blurb. He shares advice on creativity and bookmaking here monthly. Blurb is a self-publishing platform where you can self-publish your books beautifully.