Art Literature & AI

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Change is in our wheelhouse. Essay. 1400 words, 7-minute read.

https://listverse.com/2022/06/03/10-alternative-versions-of-the-mona-lisa/

Art Literature & AI

By Ray Tabler

AI, or large language models, are scaring a lot of people. Understandably so. A good portion of the unease around what we are stuck calling AI stems from the dishonest manner in which the current crop of large language models were trained. The management of these companies faced a choice; fairly compensate the authors and artists for use of their works, or just scrape the material from the internet in what looks to be blatant theft. Well, three guesses as to which option was chosen.

This was the equivalent of stealing the contents of every art museum and library in the world and grinding those treasures all up to making desktop printer ink. It all boiled down to a business decision, a calculation that the eventual court-ordered settlement would cost less than walking the legal and moral path. That doesn’t fill me with confidence about the decision-making skills of the people running this industry. But the genie is out of the bottle. And genies are loathe to be stuff back into their bottles once out.

Perhaps some comfort can be taken, or at least some perspective gleaned, from the realization that we’ve danced to this tune before. At its core, AI is simply a new technology. And new technologies can be disruptive. Granted, this particular disruption looks to be a hum dinger. But we’re human beings. We climbed down from the trees. We colonized the globe, adapting to conditions from the equator to the poles. We invented every crazy thing on Earth and folded those mixed blessing into our civilization. Change is in our wheelhouse. So, get a grip. We’ll figure it out, eventually.

Let’s review some past examples.

Visual art and photography – Prior to the advent of photography, if you wanted an image it had to be handmade via a variety of techniques (line drawing, painting, etc…). Image quality depended to a great degree on the talent of the individual artist(s) involved. Talent is not evenly distributed throughout the population, and the better the artist the higher the price could be charged.

Then, along came photography. Suddenly, anyone who could afford a camera and the investment in (silver-based) film could accurately record images with a simple click of the shutter. This democratized the business of image creation, enormously reduced price and barrier to entry. Talent with the paint brush or the pencil was replaced with talent to recognize a striking opportunity to capture an image on film. In reaction modern art was born, simply because that was something the camera could not do. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? The debate rages on.

Music and phonography – Until Edison invented the phonograph all music was live. All lectures had to be attended or read later as printed transcripts. Then the ephemeral voice was imprisoned upon wax, later tape. Today, we can listen to the words and music of the best artists and brightest minds without having to crowd into halls for the privilege. The cost was the disappearance of countless minor singers and musicians who previously put food on the table by entertaining us.

Singers and musicians still scratch out a stubborn living around the world, all striving to attain a level of fame which will provide conditional economic security. Fans still pay to attend concerts produced by those popular enough to make the industrial fabrication of music profitable. The music business didn’t collapse. But it sure changed.

Acting, dance and motion pictures – For thousands of years live theater was the only kind of theater there was. Actors and dancers crafted each and every performance, each and every night. Or twice a day if there was a matinee. Edison, again, put a stop to that. Live theater still lives. But it has evolved under the lash of the kinescope and then the video camera.

Still photography and recorded sound as technologies differ in their timescales as to the effect upon what they replaced. Photography and phonography hit and transformed visual and audio art with the suddenness of a diving hawk. Both technologies have improved constantly since, but within a generation they’d forever altered the landscape of painting, drawing and musical performances. Motion pictures, more mechanically complex, has allowed a somewhat slower change of pace, as films added sound, color, visual quality throughout the 20th century. Then, video tape and digital recording democratized both the making and the viewing of motion pictures. The transformation was slower, but perhaps more profound.

Scholarship and printing – Before the printing press scholarship demanded commitment on scale seldom seen since. Books were rare and precious things. A rich person might proudly own a library of 50 volumes. The great library of Alexandria (before it burned) essentially kidnapped any book which passed through the city until a copy could be made. All because books were copied by hand, one at a time. Scribes laboriously scratched away as long as there was daylight to see by. Access to recorded knowledge depended upon the good will of powerful people. The role of scholar often demanded a life dedicated to the Catholic church, as a monk laboriously copying books a page at a time.

Then Gutenberg improved upon some tech smuggled out of China, moveable type printing. And the world changed. With the industrial production of books knowledge of all kinds was suddenly readily available to just about anyone. Learning exploded and grew exponentially. But along with practical information, like science and literature, radical ideas spread like wildfire. The Catholic church divided. Empires toppled. Authority was challenged and usually found wanting. We still deal with the echoes of a quicker, cheaper way to produce books today.

And now, to paraphrase a saying, technology has come for our brains. We don’t yet have a thinking machine. But we do seem to have one which will do things we previously thought only people could. (Or, as the saying goes, close enough for government work.) Perhaps the machines don’t do it all that satisfactorily, yet. But they do seem to work well enough to make somebody money. And, frankly, that’s all it takes. As long as there’s a profit to be had, the machines will get better and better.

New technologies can be like a toddler running wild with a hammer in a china shop. Stuff’s gonna get broken. The toddler delights in the sound of shattered pottery and the consternation of invested adults.

Things are going to change. What? I don’t know any better than anyone else. We can speculate. AI-generated video may put human actors out of work. AI-generated literature and artwork may make human authors and artists obsolete. AI-enhanced analysis and thinking may render humans themselves (us!) unnecessary. That’s some extremely worrying potential downside. And if we let any of that happen, shame on us.

AI is simply a new technology, a new tool in our belt. Things will change, just like they have before. Photography. Phonograhy. Motion pictures. Printing. They all broke the world, each in their own way. Lives, livelihoods, fortunes, and hierarchies were smashed. We picked up the pieces and put them back together again. Until the next toddler ran wild through the china shop.

The general trend has been greater and more widespread access to knowledge. More opportunity. More prosperity. Greater accountability by authority. (Those in charge really hate that one.) Once all the hue and cry dies down, and the dust of broken pottery settles, I suspect that AI will follow that pattern. Granted, this particular toddler appears to have a particularly big hammer, and a particularly long handle to swing it with.

But what choice do we have? It is our job as humans to clean up the messes our curiosity makes. We sweep the wreckage into the dust bin and keep what’s still useful. Strangely enough, new valuable items always seem to be awaiting discovery in the debris. We would never have suspected the existence of these new things if we’d kept a tighter rein on our toddlers. Change is in our wheelhouse. Chaotic, uncontrolled, disruptive change. And it always has been. In fact, change might end up being the only thing machines can’t handle as well as we wacky human do.

And if you think AI is disruptive, just wait until we start putting chips in our heads.

END.

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