Art the old-fashioned way
I admit I am a little obsessed by the problem of AI, not least because I am an author of fiction and non-fiction, an occasional artist, a composer of music, and a maker of videos. I would love to put my head in the sand, but I have to engage with the debate, not least because my day job is as a publisher and I regularly receive AI submissions.
Usually, AI submissions can be immediately rejected for the simple reason that the technology cannot (yet) compose well-written, creative, thoughtful fiction. But, after a while, I start seeing AI where it may not exist. After all, it is only plagiarising what others have written in the past. I suspect that I receive some submissions that are AI-generated but which are then reworked by humans to erase obvious ‘tells’. I don’t think it is a problem if I mistake genuine fiction for AI (as long as I don’t wrongly accuse the author); I am simply going to exercise my judgement and reject any submission where parts of the text make no sense when they are interrogated, no matter how beguiling they might appear on the surface.
But, full disclosure, I am prejudiced against AI-generated fiction, because I would like to think I am engaging with the work of another human being. But does this mean I should hate AI in all aspects of life? If AI is better at analysing medical conditions than a human being and this means additional lives are saved, I would be stupid to argue against it, even if some medical technicians (who have spent their whole careers saving lives) are now unemployed.
So far, so easy. AI fiction is bad, but AI in medical research is good. But what about all the uses of AI in between?
Take the case of AI non-fiction, which is notoriously bad, especially in representing information that is not well-represented online. I recently received a submission of a reference book on ‘psychic detectives’ that was obviously ‘scraped’ from the internet and was full of egregious errors and misrepresentations. I suspect that if the ‘author’ had submitted a book on a subject for which more material had been available to AI, the errors would have been less prevalent. Among my own non-fiction writing, I have published two biographies, and I utterly detest the blasé inaccuracies of Grok. But I have a friend who is a poet, and I know he would be against AI poetry, but he regularly uses Grok because it seems to be accurate in those areas that are of interest to him.
And how about AI in music? I am as prejudiced against AI music as I am AI prose, probably because I have always engaged with music on a personal level. I have close friends who are talented musicians, and I have been involved in songwriting myself. My musician friends all hate AI music just as much as my writer friends all hate AI prose, but one of those musicians also happily uses Grok. And a well-known band whose music, politics, etc, I really enjoy and respect (and who I assume would also be vehemently against AI music), has recently used AI art to publicise their gigs.
The level of our reaction against AI depends entirely on our own personal perspectives. In music this was recently illustrated for me from a different perspective. A writer told me they didn’t object to AI music because they enjoyed mindlessly singing along with catchy pop songs. What is the difference, they asked, between AI, and the modern Tin Pan Alley cynically churning out tunes recorded by session musicians for fake boy and girl bands to mime to?
It strikes me that AI is dividing and conquering, and none of us are immune.
I begin to find my own opinions uncomfortable to analyse when it comes to AI art. I have always drawn illustrations for books and have acquired some degree of competence, although I often tidy up my drawings and add colour and textures using Photoshop. As a publisher, I am also an art director, with deadlines and budgets, and artists can be awkward to work with. When Midjourney first appeared as an online tool, I explored its possibilities, but I have since decided against using it. I must confess to having less of a problem with AI art because I am less invested in it.
I am even less invested in film. When I heard about Particle6 making an AI film with the AI ‘actor’ Tilly, my first reaction was, how is this any different from a Pixar film? Nobody complains that Buzz Lightyear wasn’t played by a real actor? Or that Pixar didn’t use proper stop-go animation. Where’s the harm? Real people will still have to edit the story, the dialogue, etc. But then I remembered my very limited experience with movie-making, and how fundamentally important the Director of Photography will be. AI will be shamelessly plundering all the accumulated skills of generations of Directors of Photography without any understanding of the magic they perform. If I am against AI fiction and music and, yes, art, I should be just as against it in film, or any other form of creativity. It is very difficult to stop ourselves being divided and conquered depending on our level of engagement and investment.
All of my arguments, so far, have dealt with the threat from AI to artistic and creative endeavours, and I have noticed that many people in the arts seem to believe that their interests perhaps have more right to be defended from AI than jobs that are considered more mundane or everyday areas of human activity. One argument is that job losses as a result of AI are analogous to those lost in the Industrial Revolution. But some of those people in ‘inartistic’, ‘mundane’ jobs are not just earning a wage, and (hopefully) experiencing some degree of job satisfaction and self-affirmation, but they are offering services that, from time to time, are of vital importance, even to those of us in the arts. I can imagine somebody on a Microsoft or Apple helpline listening to AI generated music between calls, staring at an AI generated image on the wall in front of them, worried their job is going to be replaced by AI. And then they receive a call from a writer who has inadvertently deleted their novel from their laptop (it happens!) If the helpline operative is wrong not to care about the use of AI in art and music, perhaps the writer needs to question their acceptance of AI in areas they consider inartistic and mundane?
