Don’t let AI take the pen

In a world where machines create, how much longer do human artists have before they're obsolete?

AI is replacing creative jobs at an alarming pace. The industry is being transformed and flooded with artificially produced content. And while the most fervent of artists might have wild mood swings, robots do anything but.

As artist groups seek to protect their rights and guard against copyright and their artistic integrity being threatened, the debate rages on.

Fuelling the creative fire

As shown recently, by one of the best ads at the Super Bowl by GoDaddy, AI was used in storyboarding, but not so much in post-production. This shows that a spark of inspiration can light the creative fire.

Take the TV producer whose job involves many processes. You wouldn’t want an AI overlord directing the whole process, but what about in production?

“From drawing, design, and color theory, to my major specifics like editing, voice acting, cinematography, and producing, everything I learned now can be done in a prompt. The worst is that audiences don’t care if it’s AI or human-made as long as it is cheaper and faster – or that’s what I have seen." Mariana Gomez, producer of the live TV show Habla Que Te Escucho, told Cybernews.

The pursuits that AI is most efficient at are the transactional ones. If the audience is in sync with the output – think weekly reality TV shows, regular cheap romantic paperback novels, commercial radio jingles, and writing quick ad taglines for basic ad copy – then a dominant effect shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Here we can say that AI has displaced the lowest-tier end of the creative industry.

Art’s AI apocalypse

Traditional types like seasoned novelists and other opponents fear that artificial “scraping” of credible content will mean calling curtains on being able to think creatively.

A friend recently showed me a mashup of Nirvana songs sung in the style of The Beatles, and it was a fun listen. But that didn’t mean we wouldn’t listen to either of those bands in their own right.

When musician Grimes said in 2023 that anyone could use her voice for AI-generated content, it was a rare example of an artist embracing the new tech.

Grimes' stance could also be viewed as more of an exception than the norm. Most others, especially traditional creative types, are at sword points with artificial intelligence when it comes to getting up in their space.

When art is viewed as a livelihood, a personal struggle, then the subtleties and paradoxes ring even louder. It’s hard to imagine giving an AI Oscar Wilde or Francis Bacon the same respect for rebelling against a homophobic society in their respective art forms.

With thousands of books being fed into AI by the bucketload as it’s absorbed to train it to imitate novels, it’s understandable that there would be objections.

As a writer, I use AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT almost every day, to help me write, but not to write for me. They can be used to bounce ideas off of, summarise dry and complex bits of information, and ultimately save time. As creative writers, it’s up to us to use AI tools wisely and not give them the pen, so to speak.

Historical fiction author E.L. Johnson told Cybernews:

What’s better then, staring at the bottle of wine at night, drowning in writer's block, or having a digital assistant to spin ideas off?

The death of authenticity

How do we discern what is ultimately genuine? Personally speaking, Open AI’s art generator Dall-E seemed fun at the outset, asking it to paint absurd and personalized pictures, but now it seems dull and gimmicky.

If AI is verily scraping the web, ripping off Picasso from an amalgamation of sources, then surely we have to look at it squarely as a pastiche. Perhaps it’s best to look at where the hype is currently at in video production:

"Since AI is the aggregate of the average, it is able to source and create very average and cliché creative. However, a creative should deliver extraordinary concepts and extraordinary execution, anyone delivering ordinary deserves to be replaced,” Reilly Newman, Brand Strategist/Founder at Motif Brands shared with Cybernews.

We could forecast a scarcity premium on human created art in the future as the craftsmanship among artisans will become more sacred.

The “scarcity premium” would allow things like imperfection and a creator's story almost to become “high art” – think an artist and curator giving a talk in a gallery being a priceless experience – highly desired and rare, therefore luxurious.

The best art form to show how AI makes plastic is in the music industry. There are approximately 120,000 AI-produced songs that are uploaded daily to streaming services, so such a high quantity and continuous velocity seems ominous for your garage-rock band like The White Stripes.

As AI would most likely galvanize its opponents, it’s hard to imagine jazz gigs by robots sold out across the land.

There will always be purists in cinema, music, and paintings, and fans will gravitate to what they appreciate, no matter how much is churned out.

The empathy resonates with their jobs going through the meat grinder. I suppose everyone across every industry currently has to ask themselves if they're replaceable.

As for the mass consumption of producing needlessly, it seems confining to blame AI – after all, it was Andy Warhol who started it.