I’ve been musing about a longer post about AI, because my thoughts about the current large language models (LLMs) and the like have evolved over the past year as we’ve looked into more and more use cases at the dayjob.
However, if you detected skepticism in my previous posts about AI and my many links to articles and videos, that doubt has not dissipated. Besides the consistently cited environmental impacts, something that at best must be taken into consideration, the threat to creative folks (illustrators, musicians, writers, and so on) remains. And the value proposition of destroying the livelihood of these various creative professions doesn’t add up to me… but it was this talk by author Brandon Sanderson that articulates a central reason why.
By the way, I think this is a pretty brisk 20-minute talk, but if you’re a fast reader, you can check out the written version.
I know he’s not the first person to note that art has inherent value and he won’t be the last. Heck, another author I frequently cite had a video about the same idea last month. And it bears repeating.
The value of art has always been separate from the profitability of art. In other words, what creating art does for the artist has value that is separate from the price one may be able to sell said art product.
In fact, I would suggest that the value of many tasks has similar value to the individual separate from the outcome — and this is not confined to creative folks: budding doctors, lawyers, even file clerks all benefit from working through “low-level” tasks that contribute to what becomes years of experience.
You know, I can’t tell you how many science fiction stories I’ve read or seen or listened to where the dystopian future is one where the machines do all the tasks –all the thinking– that humans have done. This leaves the humans’ cognitive ability and imagination atrophied. Consider how most of us no longer have dozens of phone numbers memorized thanks to smart phones — and some people reading this are aghast that people ever memorized dozens of phone numbers. Now multiply this phenomenon by the tens of thousands, that we as a species no longer know how to make tens of thousands of items like pencils, we can no longer conceive of countless concepts fueled by dozens of seemingly unrelated experiences. Humans think and do and reflect. We don’t need to do it all, but we shouldn’t do nothing (or, as Sanderson mentions, die like John Henry in beating a machine).
The fear in those sci-fi stories is that we will have delegated too much of our living to machines who have riddled out how to optimize living by our prior experiences. And with no new humans and human experiences to add to this knowledge base, stagnation and even decay set in. And besides the fact that not all living should be optimized (especially to someone else’s standards), creating art is one of the best parts of living. I feel like I’ve been pretty consistent in arguing this point.
So I still need to do a post on more of how I do find the current crop of AI tools useful, but for those of you feeling like the current push for AI in everything is awry. Yeah, you’re not wrong. Especially when it comes to art. Stay human.