A.I. IS COMING TO EAT YOUR CHILDREN!

Well, probably not. But hopefully that got your attention. And even if AI isn’t going to eat your children, it might just consume them in another way. It’s a metaphor, see?

No AI was involved in the creation of this image,
as is no doubt apparent

On a recent training course, I was told that if you don’t like AI, it’s because you don’t understand it.  Thing is, I do understand it. And it terrifies me.

 

That’s not to say that I’ve never used AI.  Like all technological tools, it can be useful.  This is very much a post about the use of AI in the creative arts.  I’m not a paranoid Luddite shrieking hysterically about robots taking over the world.  I understand that Artificial Intelligence is just that - artificial. Created by us.  Which means we should tread carefully in choosing when it is appropriate to use it.

 

AI does not write a story, or generate a piece of art, or produce a song from nowhere.  It can do this because it has been fed hundreds of years’ worth of writing, art and music, created by real humans.  Simply put: it is stealing our work.  I’m not deluded enough to believe that anyone would request a song in the style of me, but my music is out there online, freely available to be mined and fed to an AI song generator.

 

As a teacher, there is another moral quandary to be faced here.  I’ve always seen it as my role – perhaps idealistically – to foster a generation of independent, critically-thinking young minds.  Check the sources, not just the AI summary, guys.  Let your imagination run wild.  Isn’t it a little hypocritical of me to expect the children I teach to produce their own writing, if I’m not able to do it myself?

 

Who ultimately benefits when we lose the ability to think for ourselves and question what we’re told?  An unquestioning, unthinking population is one that’s easy to subdue and - more troublingly - exploit.  AI is not the great leveller that the tech companies want us to believe it is.  If the market is flooded with AI-generated slop, it’s only going to make it harder for anyone to make money from art.  The only people who will get rich from AI are the tech giants.

 

But perhaps the most compelling argument against AI is this: why do we make art in the first place?  Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, an AI company that can generate an entire song from a minimal prompt, said in a recent interview with the Guardian, “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

 

Can this really be true?  I’d like to know who Mikey’s been speaking to.  Someone who has produced a song at the click of a button will never know the buzz I get from performing on stage, or just noodling away on my keyboard on a Sunday afternoon.  Funnily enough, I also enjoy the time I spend writing. (Yes, even this post, ironically).  Our appreciation of and ability to create art is one of the defining traits of our species.  What will humanity lose if we remove that creative process from our skillset?

 

When I put a piece of music out into the world, who can say whether I actually spent time writing, playing and recording it?  Who can say whether I actually wrote this post? Maybe I asked an AI to clone my tone and write an introspective piece on its own failings.  At the end of the day, you’ll never know.  And doesn’t that scare you?