I’ve been posting musings and plenty of articles videos about AI for a while now. There’s a lot of doom and gloom about the disruption AI is causing and may cause for society. And there’s also schadenfreude at the limits of AI in the face of people wanting AI to be their One True God.
So I wanted to pause with some of those sorts of articles and muse about what a possible positive future can be with AI which, absent a Butlerian Jihad, is going to be with us in one form or another for the forseeable future.
That’s the spirit in which I read Daniel Jeffries’ article for Freethink about a non-dystopian future using AI… and if you’re a creator like me, it’s probably good to suggest you take a breath upon reading his rosy picture in the opening paragraphs and get deeper into the article.
(I’ll pause while you read… and breathe. Remember to breathe).
I do think he’s got a point about the cost of media projects like feature films and games being so high risk (and therefore often innovation) does not occur. I am less sanguine about the idea that the increased output will be okay. His example of the e-book explosion is both a good example… and maybe not the example that everything will be hunky-dory. When more people are able to create slop, it’s harder to rise above… and AI allows for exponential slop.
I am taking heart in that really good work can rise above the slop layer, but I think that’s a “can” not an “always will.” And some of that downward pressure preventing the “always will” comes from the media companies consolidating. You can make indie games and films and books. The barrier for entry and production may be lower, but I don’t believe the ability to find and foster an audience is easier. Is it the same as it ever was? That’s something to consider with more data.
I like Jeffries’ assertion that creative people are going to use current and future AI as tools for collaboration that bring costs down, but for productions to ramp up, there needs to be an environment where small, entrepreneurial creators can survive… and I don’t think the big media companies or big tech companies behind AI care about fostering that ecosystem.
The hollowing out of “mid-list” everyone in creative fields: musicians, novelists, actors, is worth its own examination, but my point raising it here is that it’s been around before AI due to consolidated corporate forces. AI has just exacerbated that. So I’d love to believe Jeffries’ assertion that “It’s 2033… Instead of releasing 10 to 20 AAA titles a year like it used to, the industry now ships over a thousand.” We need more than AI and a plucky attitude to get to those 1,000 titles (and is that number even profitable to bankroll a thousand for the next year?). We need some paradigm shifts in how the industry works… and probably some paradigm shifts in how AI works, or rather how we want AI to work.
That’s why I think it’s a good article to read in concert with this video excerpt from Star Talk, where Jaron Lanier, who gives his usual think-outside-the-box-because-he-builds-geodesic-domes take on things:
I’m not ready to say “there’s no AI,” but I do find it useful to think about how we use it as a collaboration tool… as I think non-skeezy people doing so automatically addresses a lot of the issues of AI. Lord knows it doesn’t address all the structural IP-ripping-off, energy-vampire structural issues of AI, but look. I’m trying not to be completely doom and gloom here.
Now I’m going to step away from the computer and just focus on breathing. And maybe a cookie.