Question: Why is it that AI has so much trouble distinguishing between things that are made and things that grow? And is this a metaphor?

Studio Exec: Purely AI-generated works are public domain, so your job is to provide Minimal Human Intervention™ to give us copyright protections. Here are 800 AI movie scripts. They need a new font and at least three commas moved.


Writer: So glad I got that master's degree...

DN Schmidt, writer, on Twitter

The writers and artists on social media are in high dudgeon about AI-generated 'art', and with good reason. They're aware that dummies in offices who make business decisions will cheerfully decide that finally, machines have replaced those pesky creative types. Now nothing will stand in the way of their aim in life, which is to make money 'entertaining' people with generically reproduced cookie-cutter stories, pictures, films, etc, scientifically designed to push the right buttons and reap financial rewards from the general public.

The dream, you see, is to come up with the entertainment versions of a McDonald's hamburger: something that doesn't completely satisfy anyone, but is just close enough to pass muster with almost everyone. People left out by the word 'almost' can lump it. So it goes.

While everyone is busy getting mad at the AI people for saddling us with this issue, I hasten to point out that it isn't new. Here's a quote from Walter Benjamin's essay, written in 1935, called 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction':

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.

– translation, Harry Zohen, available to read from MIT

Well, that clears things up, right? Movies are fascist, says a Marxist. My point is that every new technology upsets people. It takes a while for artists to adjust and turn what looks to the Dunning-Kruger crowd like a handy new shortcut for getting back to their favourite pastime, i.e., making piles of money, back into what it really is: a tool.

I once watched my late father design a house on the fly. He used a piece of shirt cardboard, a pencil, a ruler, and a quarter (for drawing curves). He signed the design with his name and licence number and handed it to his brother, a housing developer. With it, a farmer who owned a plot of land got a government loan to build a house on it. The farmer had never owned a store-bought house like that. Like everybody else in the area, and like my dad growing up, he'd lived in cabins and shacks built by neighbours in concert. Now the federal housing authority was offering low-cost loans – and my uncle handed his visiting brother a pencil and a piece of cardboard.

Many years later, I discussed the new technology with my dad. Now retired, he was on the advisory board of the local college's engineering department. The subject was Computer-Aided Design (CAD).

My dad said, 'There's nothing wrong with that stuff. The students just need to learn that it's a tool. They still need to know how to draw.' (Now you know why I was always so sad that I couldn't draw.)

AI can be a tool for visual artists. I have yet to figure out how it can be a tool for prose writers, but perhaps someone can enlighten me. It could be used for formatting, I suppose, but Word tools will do me. So far, the only use I have found for ChatGPT is to play silly pranks upon it and make mock. Or try to get two of them arguing in order to enjoy the confusion. I guess I should worry that once the robots take over they'll have my name on a hit list, but somehow, I'm not really concerned.

The main problems with AI in the creative fields, it seems to me, are threefold:

1. Plagiarism. This can be solved by making it illegal for AI programmers to input existing copyrighted material. Make 'em use public domain like the rest of us peons.
2. Misuse of Other People's Images. There need to be privacy laws in place here, and protections for actors and models. Nobody should find out that they've accidentally signed over the use of their image or voice to some AI generator and will now be advertising dog food for all eternity.
3. The Churning Out of Endless Amounts of Garbage. See reference to McDonald's above. Don't like it that movies are using dialogue mass-produced by ChatGPT? Don't watch the movies. This will be impossible for some people to do. I swear that if the only movie showing in Oxford was a five-hour epic entitled Regarder la peinture sécher, Awix would be there. And yes, we'd publish the review. But vote with your feet, folks: go to see the movies with physical effects, not CGI. If the magic money well dries up, they'll shrug and move on. They have no shame, these people.

In the meantime, all this hoopla about AI 'art' – which, in the case of 99% of users, is merely going to result in a new set of visual clichés – is paying off for the likes of us, h2g2 Researchers with creative drive and no resources, in the form of new tools.

I come from a long line of hillbilly improvisers. You don't always have the 'right' tool at hand, but you can learn to 'make do'. My Mississippi grandmother tenderised steak with a claw hammer, and I was grown before I even knew there was such a thing as a meat mallet.

Right now, I have three not-so-great tools at my disposal besides my digital camera. Among them all, I can do something. See this picture?

'AI,' you say. Well, sort of. I made Microsoft Designer come up with a reed boat and a river. I erased any attempt on its part to put people in it. I added a Hoggett goat. Then I started describing individual things I wanted in my boat: two guys sitting, from behind, figs, hay, a man standing, an oar. And I moved them around. Then I put them in Paint (underrated program, Paint: you wouldn't have a Post issue without it) and changed the hair colour on one. Then I put it in the photo manipulation that's on this computer – I call it 'baby Photoshop' – and changed the lighting and balance with filters. So. . . AI? Or AI valiantly outwitted by devious but determined author?

Yes, yes: I know Michelangelo would have had nothing to worry about. Nor, I think, do any real artists out there. Who does, I suspect, are those creative people who work in commercial markets, like illustration or cinema. If we start seeing matte paintings in films where the background figures have suspicious numbers of limbs, we'll know what's going on. (See this week's Gheorgheniplex cartoon.)

So: AI challenges? Yes. End of the world? No, that's climate change. Go save the environment, people. Sweat less about the small stuff.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

04.09.23 Front Page

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