The End Of An Error

AI is good for crunching large amounts of data to find patterns within it. Humans then need to analyze those patterns.

For research, it might be extremely useful. However, since most of us here are creators of one stripe or another, I'll focus on what it's doing there.

It's wreaking havoc among musicians who previously found some sort of steady, reliable income through Spotify and other streaming services. AI generated music crowds out all but well established acts and old standards; musicians struggling to break through find their support in live performances and merchandise.

AI generated blog posts and emails are already dominating those venues, perversely causing more and more people to ignore them. In fiction writing it enables mediocre writers to hack out acceptable mediocre genre fiction at prodigious rates. There, too, it will eventually undermine itself as discerning readers look for something more original and idiosyncratic. Original writers will need to put more time into promoting / marketing themselves, and the revenues will probably dip the way they have for musicians, but the ones who weather through it will survive.

Artists are already being hard hit. Top line design jobs will still go to humans who can understand the wants and needs of other humans, but for lots of lower level art jobs it will be easier to generate / steal art (full disclosure: I gleefully swipe AI generated art when I find something that fits my fictoids when I post them on my blog; unlike public domain art I post, the AI prompters get no credit or recognition).

The next big sh!t hammer to fall will be AI video. Already passable short films have been made using AI generated clips skillfully edited together.

It helps that most of these are short-shorts of a horror / sci-fi / fantasy nature since AI’s inability to remain consistent can play into the air of unreality found in those genres.  Once AI learns how to stay on model it will be a major game changer.

Elsewhere I've said I have no objection against people using AI for personal amusement, creating their own music videos, mashing up art, creating political satire, etc.

But doing that is going to undermine mass media by creating user-specific content. What that will do culturally is anybody's guess; what happens to cultural touchstones when there isn't one version of Gilligan's Island but a three hundred million?

There's a lot of practical uses real artists can find for AI (musicians trying out different orchestrations, artists doing a variety of concepts before settling on the one they want to develop, writers creating prompts for themselves, etc.) but it's already disrupting the creative sphere.

© Buzz Dixon