It’s official – artificial intelligence has taken hold in nearly every industry, and it’s likely playing an everyday role in your life (whether you’re aware or not). As someone who’s used graphics software for over a decade, I pinch myself when I see the emerging capabilities of AI-driven tools in software like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Changing someone’s facial expression at the click of a button? Making automated selections that differentiate subjects from one another? We don’t even need to write creatively to promote our work – all we need is an AI-integrated copywriting tool to generate a blog post that uses the exact right words to direct traffic to our websites (*I’m not using AI to write this). We’re fast approaching a new frontier where we can distort our realities more efficiently than ever before.
Software like Adobe’s creative suite is only one example of AI integration in creative fields – AI artwork has become recent trend in newsfeeds nearly everywhere – viral apps like Lensa and Prisma, and even built-in features in TikTok offer paid services to use your selfies to generate entirely new works of art featuring your likeness. Plenty of folks are using it to see alternate or idealistic, fantastical versions of themselves, and developers know that most of us want to see ourselves in these forms (stay tuned for my future post on “filter bubbles”). The technology that makes this magic happen, however – automated algorithmic processes trained to take existing information and “learn” from it to develop something brand new – wouldn’t produce anything without the using real artwork by human artists to train them.
There’s plenty of criticism out there that highlights the issue, going so far as characterizing it as a contemporary manifestation of colonialism. This isn’t as far off as we’d like to think, especially when (1) we inadvertently volunteer our valuable personal data to proprietary platforms for future targeted advertising and (2) the “training” data that AI requires and appropriates to develop artwork without crediting original sources for unimaginably high profits. Artists aren’t compensated, platform developers line their pockets and users unknowingly pay to have their own data appropriated.
AI has also found its way into music and audio production, ranging from integrated tools to entire platforms dedicated to making trained audio professional careers obsolete . An audio mastering engineer’s decades of experience and combined knowledge of musicality, context, creativity and precise work are allegedly no match for LANDR, a paid software tool that claims to have your track “radio-ready in minutes”. A recent trend on social media highlighted an app called ChatGPT by users training a model to “read” thousands of songs of a particular genre to automatically compose a pop-punk song complete with chords, melodies and lyrics.
Sure – artificial intelligence has a place and a purpose, and I find it useful in many ways. If it were up to me, I’d leave AI in the realm of software integrations to enhance specific tasks that benefit from human creativity. It’s absolutely worth thinking about the ethics of it all, but to get a little philosophical: what fulfilment or sense of purpose it gives us as humans if we outsource our creativity to algorithms for the sake of efficiency and ease? When we develop tools intentionally designed to cross this boundary, we devalue and underestimate the importance of imperfect expression of ourselves.
The bottom line? Creating things makes us human. Support creative professionals who’ve dedicated their lives to mastering their craft.
How do you feel about artificial intelligence in your field? Drop a line in the comments!
Stay tuned for The Media Revolution 2.2 – I’ll talk about the perils of using gig work sites like Fiverr, de-personalized cookie-cutter services and more!
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