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Outsourcing Art and Literature to Machines Isn’t Wise
Something essential will be lost if we substitute our own passion and imagination with chatbots and image generating programs.
Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) have been receiving a lot of press lately. I have previously expressed skepticism that words like intelligence can ever be accurately applied to machines of any sort, including computers. Here I wish to consider the consequences recent developments in A.I. have for us both as individuals and as a society.
Among the A.I. stories receiving a great deal of attention over the past year was A.I.’s victory in a Colorado art competition. According to a New York Times article on the picture’s blue ribbon, the “artist”, Jason Allen, generated the image using “Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics.”
To be fair, Mr. Allen’s picture was entered in the Colorado State Fair’s digital art competition, so it wasn’t competing directly with painters or other visual artists who do their work without the assistance of computers. Furthermore, he disclosed he had used Midjourney software to produce the image when he entered the competition, so there can be no question of him deceiving either the competition’s organizers or judges.
It is, of course, true that what distinguishes digital visual artists from painters, illustrators, and others using more traditional tools and techniques is their use of modern computer technology. Nonetheless, they are still directly involved in the creation and manipulation of the images they produce. For example, digital artists do not simply type instructions like “create a picture of the Last Supper in the style of Picasso” and let the computer do the rest.
While Mr. Allen has not disclosed the text instructions he entered that produced his winning picture, he does not argue he did anything more than enter text instructions to generate it. Indeed, he boasts that “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” has rendered artists obsolete proclaiming triumphantly…
