Them Awful A.I. Blues...

There’s at least one storyteller in every community, somebody who helps shape the culture of that community by providing a model -- positive or negative -- on what it means to be a member of that community.

While this can mean literally to morals and ethics and rituals of a particular community, more often than not it is a story of a different time, a different place, sometimes factual, sometimes wholly imaginary, sometimes a mixture of both.

And the storyteller may be a poet, a painter, a puppeteer, or a priest.  What they do is of more importance than how they do it.

Until fairly recently -- a little less than 600 years compared to the minimum of 200,000 years of human language before that -- storytellers were typically rewarded for their performance, not their creativity.*       

They would create stories in the form of poetry and art, a few composing written works but most using oral traditions to pass the stories along.

And with rare exceptions such as dramatists hired to create a play for public performance, none were rewarded for the stories themselves but for their repeated rendition of same.

Bards would hear songs and memorize and adapt them to suit their own tastes.  When these tales proved popular enough they became part of a cultural tradition, but typically many variant versions of these stories exist with their deviations often taking on a life of their own.**

In short, the act of creativity held no value in and of itself, but the performance or presentation did.

Johannes Gutenberg changed all that circa 1440 with his printing press.

Once printing hit the scene, the actual created work itself -- or more precisely, copies of the original work -- acquired a value.  While there had been some earlier cases of lawsuits brought over unauthorized handwritten copies of religious texts, it wasn’t until works could be literally cranked out by the thousands that literary piracy (including music scores and art prints) deprived creators of rightful income and the first copyright laws were passed in the early 18th century.

For creators, this proved a bountiful era.  Cheap printed material meant more people could afford to read for pleasure, creating a market that rewarded creators for new content.  A creator of average skill and talent but a good work ethic could make a decent living for themselves by creating works for others to read or perform.

Minor glitches occurred along the way.  Inexpensive photocopying made it possible for individuals to copy otherwise hard to obtain material, computers and scanning made copying works almost cost free.

Nonetheless, most professional creators found it possible to either earn a living or supplement a day job by creating new works for the consumer market.

Corporate greed, however,
began factoring in.

First in the matter of public domain.  Copyright law -- especially in the United States -- granted creators with exclusive control over their creations for a fixed period of time, after which it became public domain and anyone could use it.

The idea was to provide a carrot and stick for creators (including inventors and researchers):  The carrot of making money off one’s creativity vs. the stick of needing to constantly create new things to keep up one’s cash flow.

Corporations soon found a bypass to this: Work for hire.

Publishers and producers would hire creators to make something for them that the publisher or producer would own legally as the copyright holder regardless of the input from the actual creator.

This would be used again and again to deny creators profit participation in their own works.

A second problem arose with the expanded use of trademarks.

Historically a trademark was a name and a specific logo that was used to brand a product or service viz Coca-Cola, Shell gasoline, MacDonald’s burgers, etc.  The idea was to provide a business protection from others claiming to be them to profit off their brand value.

Unlike copyrights, trademarks need never expire.

What copyrights covered soon expanded beyond just words and logos. 

Coca-Cola trademarked their classic bottle design so no one could imitate it.  Disney trademarks Every. Damn. Iteration. of their characters in perpetuity to prevent anyone from selling unlicensed products based on old or obscure character variants.***

Copyright is now also being extended to extraordinarily long terms.  In the US during most of the 20th century copyright lasted only 28 years with the option of renewing for another 28 for a total of 56 years.

This meant some long lived creators who started young -- Irving Berlin being a prime example -- saw their earliest works enter the public domain in their lifetimes.

Granted, if your output is on par with Irving Berlin’s, you’re not going to miss a handful of your earliest efforts.

But now thanks to Disney’s shill the late Sonny Bono, “copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.  For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first.” [U.S. Copyright Office]

This offers a double whammy on consumers and creators.

While it may seem that locking up a work for a century or so would be in creators’ interest, in reality it actively discourages the creation of new material in favor of keeping the old in circulation.

It prevents new creators from taking ideas from old works and applying them in new ways to contemporary creations.

And it absolutely discourages publishers and producers from seeking new concepts that would undercut the value of the old.

That’s bad enough as is.

AI is just making it worse.

Finally, the challenge of being creative in the digital era above and beyond the problem of AI.

Tech bros crowed that the internet superhighway was be a great tool for democracy insofar as it would eliminate gatekeepers.

The thing about gatekeepers is that they set some sort of entry bar.

Even before AI showed up, the number of books being published -- especially digitally -- skyrocketed.

Without gatekeepers to set minimum levels of competency, the market quickly became awash in unmemorable substandard work.

I mean, there’s always been a lot of unmemorable substandard work in every creative field, but while Ted Sturgeon’s famous observation that “90% of everything is crap” once held true, today I think the number’s more like 99%.

As I’ve posted elsewhere, all humans are satisfied with acceptable mediocrity 80% of the time.

A creative work doesn’t need to be great, just diverting.  The bulk of popular entertainment falls into well established genres and tropes.  We feel disappointed, perhaps even angered and frustrated if a work touted as belonging in a specific bin doesn’t follow at least some of the conventions of that genre.

Publishers and producers bank on that.  It’s like the movie Moneyball; you do better with a team full of reliable double hitters than a team that relies on two or three home run stars.

What AI does is to allow large corporations to produce not just a flood but a veritable tsunami of acceptable mediocrity at virtually no cost.

Here’s the paradox:

• When creativity was relatively scarce and performance was the thing, creators got little if anything for the act of creating.

• When copies of creative works became plentiful and inexpensive, creators -- and publishers and producers -- did well. 

• Now that derivative works are ubiquitous and free, creators suffer. 

Mediocre hacks who rely on AI to fill in the broad strokes of their favorite genre are already crowding more original 100% human works, reducing the spread of appeal of quality work.

I get it that AI is here, that we’ll be seeing it in a multitude of creative uses.

To be fair, I can see a place for it in generating story prompts, coming up with background walla and sound effects for visual media, providing minor details in art the way old masters employed apprentices to paint the background of their pictures, etc.

But I think we’re entering a time when genuine human creativity and insight will be a rarity.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Yeah, the Koreans beat Johannes Gutenberg to the punch re movable type printing presses, but one of the drawbacks about being the Hermit Kingdom is that when you do something really cool, nobody finds out about it until centuries later.

** Case in point:  The late 18th century English song “The Unfortunate Rake” crossed the Atlantic and found a home in Appalachia, eventually making its way south to New Orleans and west to the frontier.  The Western variant is known today as “The Streets Of Laredo” while the New Orleans version is best known as “St. James Infirmary Blues”.  Here’s Betty Boop’s take on it.

*** This causes no end of confusion to people who assume because a work containing a trademarked character has slipped out of copyright that the character itself is now part of the public domain.  No; while the work itself may now be freely copied and shared, the characters therein are still protected by trademark.  This is why you can freely republish and readapt Frank L. Baum’s Wizard Of Oz but the moment you use the MGM movie’s character designs, you can expect to find yourself on the receiving end of a cease and desist lawsuit.