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…
