AI: The future of creativity?
Curated by Megan Collins, Cultural Anthropologist, Generational Expert and contributor to the MTD blog
Imagine a world where machines can think for themselves. No I’m not talking about the 2013 film Her, I'm talking about the very near future where rapidly advancing AI tools mean computers are becoming even more sophisticated. AI promises a future where machines can “learn” from their mistakes, adapt to new situations, and even make creative decisions. In fact, it’s already being used in all sorts of ways, from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis to content creation. While it's still in its early stages of development, AI is likely going to revolutionize–or at least disrupt–every aspect of our digital lives.
AI Recommendation Systems
Perhaps the most ubiquitous way we currently use AI today is through recommendation systems: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, and more use AI to suggest products, content, and more to their users. AI recommendation systems work by analyzing large amounts of data about users’ behavior. What have we purchased in the past? What have we watched or listened to? What have we liked or shared on social media? This data is then used to train machine learning models to predict what you're likely to be interested in next.
From the products we see on Amazon to the shows we watch on Netflix, AI-algorithms are helping us find the things we love. Increasingly we’re having conversations about “generative AI.” While algorithms help surface existing content, generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as text, images, music, and code.
Generative AI
Like AI recommendation systems, Generative AI models are trained on large amounts of data, and they learn to identify the patterns and relationships in that data. Once a model is trained, it can generate new content based on the content it was fed. This is technology creators are already using! In their recent podcast episode, Colin & Samir talk about a YouTuber named Kwebbelkop. Upon the brink of burnout, the prominent Minecraft YouTuber utilized his extensive library of content to do an experiment: train an AI to create an AI character of himself to create new content in his place.
While the hosts give the experiment props for ingenuity and realistic output, they admit the content is reflective of the rudimentary nature of the technology (it’s not very good). What’s more the audience's reaction was not great. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this technology is very new and, because it requires large amounts of data from humans to train itself, is only as good as the content it's trained on. Enter a whole can of worms about ownership that raises questions like:
Can AI be truly “original” (and therefore eligible for copyright)?
Currently, AI-generated art can't be copyrighted in the US, thanks to a ruling from judge Beryl Howell. This means that if you create a work of art using AI, you may NOT put a copyright on it. Currently, the law says that copyright only protects works that are created by humans.
Who gets credit for what we “feed” the AI? AI models are trained on massive datasets of text, images, code, and other types of content. This data may be created by humans, but it is often collected and curated by corporations and other organizations. When you feed data to an AI model, you are essentially providing the model with the knowledge it needs to learn and perform its tasks. However, it can be difficult or impossible to determine who should be credited for the data that is used to train AI models. For example, if an AI model is trained on a massive dataset of text that was scraped from the internet, it’s impossible to determine exactly “authorship.”
Will AI “replace” creatives? While it was a main conversation point of the recent WGA strike, AI cannot replace creatives. It is a powerful tool that can help in creative work, but it's unlikely to replace humans entirely. AI can generate ideas, automate tasks, and streamline the creative process, but it simply can't replicate the human ability to think creatively and understand human emotions and culture.
Ultimately, AI is a double-edged sword. It has the potential to both enhance and disrupt the creative industry. It is up to us to decide how we want to use it.
How to Prepare for a Generative AI Future
Here are a few things you can do to prepare for a future where generative AI is more widely used:
First, figure out how to use it or it will use you. Learn how to use AI. The more you know about AI, the better equipped you will be to use it to your advantage. For or against it, AI is the next frontier of technology and communication. Like the printing press or the internet it will have massive and unforeseen impacts on culture both positive and negative.
At the end of the day, it is a tool and early adopters will have a leg up in the next era of the web. However, don’t teach the AI everything you know. We are still in the “training” stages of the AI revolution meaning that any content you put out into the world (especially on public content platforms) is going to continue to be scrapped to train the AI. Be selective about the content you put out into the world. AI models are trained on data from the internet, so be careful about what information you share publicly.
Prioritize your owned platforms. In the AI era, it is important to have a strong online presence that you control.