This really resonated with me. AI could be immensely useful doing grunt work. I could even see it evolving to the point where, getting a full picture from lab tests and scans, it could diagnose disease, evaluate medical procedures to find the right one for that individual, etc. But creation is soul work and can't be done by a soulless machine.
Thank you 🙏 the applications are endless, I forgot about medicine. I can’t believe they have it writing poetry before trying to help save lives/give us our lives back lol
Indeed. So many physical problems have a spiritual cause. But handling the immediate physical issue gives some respite to handle the underlying malaise. Sometimes the best medicine is a cup of tea with someone who cares and listens. And doctors today, though human, have never learned how to listen. That's why I think they could be replaced more easily than poets.
Love your thinking with regards to replacing them rather than poets. Not that simple though. Some ailing are of spiritual nature and others are physical. When you have been run down and unable to see negative health habits or patterns… at some point they will hit and hit hard.
Brilliant column! You put into words, into very specific language what has been bothering me about AI generated arts and I thank ypu for that!. This is why we value a woodturner's dining room table over a mass ptoduced one of inferiour materials offered to us by a franchise. Its why I love to feed the birds by hand rather than putting up a bird feeder and glancing at it from time to time. And its why we need to read columns, like yours.
Oh also? The man behind the curtain idea is hard hitting. For me, recently I read through the Ingalls Wilder books and looked into Laura's daughter Rose, who, it turns out essentially wrote her mom's books. The last book in the series was collected posthumously from Laura's notes and it is her true voice that honestly is NOT nearly as moving and well written as everything previous that was created by the mind and hand of her only daughter Rose Wilder. Even though my heart broke a tad bit I was still ingratiated to KNOW the truth and see a different layer/level to the amazing written works.
This breaks my heart. The private family I work has a few plastic plants and I always have a sick feeling that I can't love the plastic plants. I am so used to loving and caring for real plants.
I think its worth nothing a lot of the hype around AI is not so much driven by the technology itself but rather the fear of the people who use that technology to take their livelihood from them. Its the refrain "AI won't replace you but someone using it will." People don't fear the technology itself as much as how people will use that technology.
And we kind of already are seeing the political angles to AI play out in courtrooms and legislation as people seek to consider art that they generated by a computer as art they "Created". Hard to say how this shakes out for creatives longer term but I think the need for people to express themselves and to create real art and connect with real people will never die out. After all, "Why would I read something that nobdy could be bothered enough to write."
AI is already a powerful tool for medicine and science, but when people use it to write emails or reports, it's often because they're too lazy to think.
That is a great question that we dont know the answer to until we fully know what AI is and what it's capable of, which we are not even close to at this time. I'm willing to bet that we discover that this creation that we made in our image, is just that, an image. We like to learn the hard way, so I'm also betting it will happen like this as well.
That's also why I made this post posing the question about what matters, since one can take a philosophical route into asking 'what is real, anyway? Are we real?" Because we dont know the answer to that either, the goal should be about using technology to enhance our consciousness, not take the thinking away from us.
And personally, I highly doubt I would like anything AI generated, and that is simply because I'm a very picky reader, and if AI is based off what the masses wrote, it probably isn't good lol. I'm sure there are other people who would like AI generated content, they are already so easily bated with the media today, which was made with a lot of lazy shortcuts, remakes, and exploitation. We can do better. There are no shortcuts to becoming a better writer, or a better artist of any kind. It takes years and years of doing it the hard way.
Oct 22, 2023·edited Oct 22, 2023Liked by Kerry Jane
Have we reached peak creativity?
Are we simply rehashing the oldest greatest hits?
Certainly feels that way. I know that my novels are full of tropes and concepts that have been done to death but I spin them in my own hopefully unique fashion anyway.
These AIs are content scraping much as Google has done for their quick answers for decades. And it's all within the law of course. Artists of all kinds have been doing this too ever since the first artist created something. Copying, plagiarizing, adapting, tweaking etc. It's rare these days to see something truly original. We mostly create variations on a theme. Especially popular genre fiction.
It's early days with the AI thing and most people already can't tell if an image was put together by an AI prompt or if someone illustrated it by hand. I'm sure there are already people consuming AI/human co-produced fiction, music, images and loving it.
And instead of "borrowing" chunks from whatever library of content the AI is fed... soon enough it'll be producing original, randomly-generated "works" that will be vetted by global audiences of hungry consumers of art and entertainment and judged by it's value alone and not whether a human had to sweat tears of blood and joy to create it.
And this could still be a hybrid effort. A human could prompt some interesting background experience-based situations and the AI could churn out a hundred different stories, images and music based on them. Artists would take a more directorial role. Which again is not for everyone. Each to their own.
The same is going to happen with AI and robotics in the marketplace. People are going to be shocked at how capable robotics applications become in many different situations that previously required human labor and many years of training.
The majority of consumers are not THAT picky... although sometimes I wonder when I see comments pulling TV shows apart in GREAT detail. If it's original high art you're looking for though then yeah sure... best employ an imaginative human to explore something new. I just don't see much of that these days. We're regurgitating our food at this point.
Not losing me! This is one of the reasons why I handwrote my novel (that I am now typing in, ughhh). Also AI is being used in medicine but it is not infallible. I have lost track of the number of people that I’ve asked: did you use AI? This does not sound like you.
Oct 13, 2023·edited Oct 13, 2023Liked by Kerry Jane
I found ChatGPT and MidJourney quite entertaining for a while when they first came out, but only to dabble with myself. That entertainment didn't last long, and I stopped using them all at the beginning of the year. Thing is, though, that limited entertainment was from directly using them, because the enjoyment of creation is in the creation itself - there's a very tiny, limited aspect to using AI which vaguely touches on that, which is typing in the prompt. It's flimsy, but for a brief moment there's a bit of amusement as your prompt is turned into something else.
What I really don't get, though, is why you'd want to look at generated images or text that someone *else* has used AI to make. That removes the one tiny bit of intrigue there is with generative AI (coming up with your own prompt), which means there's really nothing left.
As you're noting here, the real joy of 'a thing' is as much in the creation of the thing as the object itself. Take that away and it's just a fake, plastic tree. It's just decoration.
Spot on! The AI is not able to create a text you can relate to. It won’t give you the satisfaction and feeling if achievement. As you said at the start… fake is still fake.
AI and the debate aside, you don't want me to have a real plant. Not unless you want it to die. (I try so hard, too. I set timers and alarms. I get easy to care for plants. I gotta have the blackest thumb on the planet.)
This really resonated with me. AI could be immensely useful doing grunt work. I could even see it evolving to the point where, getting a full picture from lab tests and scans, it could diagnose disease, evaluate medical procedures to find the right one for that individual, etc. But creation is soul work and can't be done by a soulless machine.
Thank you 🙏 the applications are endless, I forgot about medicine. I can’t believe they have it writing poetry before trying to help save lives/give us our lives back lol
Or perhaps it is believable and this is really telling of what the human race is/where we’re headed.
They found that ChatGPT made mistakes when writing about health matters. Maybe it's improved by now
Even if it does detect disease it lacks the human touch. What caused the illness what needs amending in life to improve health!?
Indeed. So many physical problems have a spiritual cause. But handling the immediate physical issue gives some respite to handle the underlying malaise. Sometimes the best medicine is a cup of tea with someone who cares and listens. And doctors today, though human, have never learned how to listen. That's why I think they could be replaced more easily than poets.
Love your thinking with regards to replacing them rather than poets. Not that simple though. Some ailing are of spiritual nature and others are physical. When you have been run down and unable to see negative health habits or patterns… at some point they will hit and hit hard.
Brilliant column! You put into words, into very specific language what has been bothering me about AI generated arts and I thank ypu for that!. This is why we value a woodturner's dining room table over a mass ptoduced one of inferiour materials offered to us by a franchise. Its why I love to feed the birds by hand rather than putting up a bird feeder and glancing at it from time to time. And its why we need to read columns, like yours.
Ps. HUE-MANATEE Still lol ing here
Thank you Janice! You see things for what they are, and your preferences and discernment reflects that.
Ummm...right back at you!
Oh also? The man behind the curtain idea is hard hitting. For me, recently I read through the Ingalls Wilder books and looked into Laura's daughter Rose, who, it turns out essentially wrote her mom's books. The last book in the series was collected posthumously from Laura's notes and it is her true voice that honestly is NOT nearly as moving and well written as everything previous that was created by the mind and hand of her only daughter Rose Wilder. Even though my heart broke a tad bit I was still ingratiated to KNOW the truth and see a different layer/level to the amazing written works.
This breaks my heart. The private family I work has a few plastic plants and I always have a sick feeling that I can't love the plastic plants. I am so used to loving and caring for real plants.
Well done.
Thank you
I think its worth nothing a lot of the hype around AI is not so much driven by the technology itself but rather the fear of the people who use that technology to take their livelihood from them. Its the refrain "AI won't replace you but someone using it will." People don't fear the technology itself as much as how people will use that technology.
And we kind of already are seeing the political angles to AI play out in courtrooms and legislation as people seek to consider art that they generated by a computer as art they "Created". Hard to say how this shakes out for creatives longer term but I think the need for people to express themselves and to create real art and connect with real people will never die out. After all, "Why would I read something that nobdy could be bothered enough to write."
AI is already a powerful tool for medicine and science, but when people use it to write emails or reports, it's often because they're too lazy to think.
What if you read a story and really enjoy it and then find out it was written using AI.
Would you then hate it and wonder how you could have been fooled into believing it was real?
What if artificial flowers become so realistic that you can't tell the difference from real ones?
What if the artificial becomes more real than the real?
What then?
That is a great question that we dont know the answer to until we fully know what AI is and what it's capable of, which we are not even close to at this time. I'm willing to bet that we discover that this creation that we made in our image, is just that, an image. We like to learn the hard way, so I'm also betting it will happen like this as well.
That's also why I made this post posing the question about what matters, since one can take a philosophical route into asking 'what is real, anyway? Are we real?" Because we dont know the answer to that either, the goal should be about using technology to enhance our consciousness, not take the thinking away from us.
And personally, I highly doubt I would like anything AI generated, and that is simply because I'm a very picky reader, and if AI is based off what the masses wrote, it probably isn't good lol. I'm sure there are other people who would like AI generated content, they are already so easily bated with the media today, which was made with a lot of lazy shortcuts, remakes, and exploitation. We can do better. There are no shortcuts to becoming a better writer, or a better artist of any kind. It takes years and years of doing it the hard way.
Have we reached peak creativity?
Are we simply rehashing the oldest greatest hits?
Certainly feels that way. I know that my novels are full of tropes and concepts that have been done to death but I spin them in my own hopefully unique fashion anyway.
These AIs are content scraping much as Google has done for their quick answers for decades. And it's all within the law of course. Artists of all kinds have been doing this too ever since the first artist created something. Copying, plagiarizing, adapting, tweaking etc. It's rare these days to see something truly original. We mostly create variations on a theme. Especially popular genre fiction.
It's early days with the AI thing and most people already can't tell if an image was put together by an AI prompt or if someone illustrated it by hand. I'm sure there are already people consuming AI/human co-produced fiction, music, images and loving it.
And instead of "borrowing" chunks from whatever library of content the AI is fed... soon enough it'll be producing original, randomly-generated "works" that will be vetted by global audiences of hungry consumers of art and entertainment and judged by it's value alone and not whether a human had to sweat tears of blood and joy to create it.
And this could still be a hybrid effort. A human could prompt some interesting background experience-based situations and the AI could churn out a hundred different stories, images and music based on them. Artists would take a more directorial role. Which again is not for everyone. Each to their own.
The same is going to happen with AI and robotics in the marketplace. People are going to be shocked at how capable robotics applications become in many different situations that previously required human labor and many years of training.
The majority of consumers are not THAT picky... although sometimes I wonder when I see comments pulling TV shows apart in GREAT detail. If it's original high art you're looking for though then yeah sure... best employ an imaginative human to explore something new. I just don't see much of that these days. We're regurgitating our food at this point.
Not losing me! This is one of the reasons why I handwrote my novel (that I am now typing in, ughhh). Also AI is being used in medicine but it is not infallible. I have lost track of the number of people that I’ve asked: did you use AI? This does not sound like you.
I found ChatGPT and MidJourney quite entertaining for a while when they first came out, but only to dabble with myself. That entertainment didn't last long, and I stopped using them all at the beginning of the year. Thing is, though, that limited entertainment was from directly using them, because the enjoyment of creation is in the creation itself - there's a very tiny, limited aspect to using AI which vaguely touches on that, which is typing in the prompt. It's flimsy, but for a brief moment there's a bit of amusement as your prompt is turned into something else.
What I really don't get, though, is why you'd want to look at generated images or text that someone *else* has used AI to make. That removes the one tiny bit of intrigue there is with generative AI (coming up with your own prompt), which means there's really nothing left.
As you're noting here, the real joy of 'a thing' is as much in the creation of the thing as the object itself. Take that away and it's just a fake, plastic tree. It's just decoration.
Spot on! The AI is not able to create a text you can relate to. It won’t give you the satisfaction and feeling if achievement. As you said at the start… fake is still fake.
AI and the debate aside, you don't want me to have a real plant. Not unless you want it to die. (I try so hard, too. I set timers and alarms. I get easy to care for plants. I gotta have the blackest thumb on the planet.)
😂 fair 🌿