Past, Present, and Future: A Christmas AI Story 🎄
The creative inspiration for this post came to me around 10am on Saturday 9 December, 2023.
Or did it…?
I originally intended to send out some hilarious (i.e. terrible) AI-generated images that I produced as part of a Christmas quiz at my workplace, but the overall thrust of this piece is slightly different now.
I'll follow up with the images + quiz questions in a special bonus Christmas post shortly, complete with an 💰🤑💸🪙 actual cash prize 💰🤑💸🪙
For now though, more overblown opinions. Exciting!
Ghost of Christmas past: unto us ChatGPT is born
It’s my second year of preparing an AI picture round for the Christmas quiz, and it's notable how much more refined the outputs are compared to last year.
Previously part of the fun was the ridiculousness of the results I was able to produce based on a few prompts: grotesque expressions, extra legs and fingers, weird perspectives - all clearly the work of a big computer in the sky. As the technology has advanced though, the images have become much more polished; it’s now difficult to make the AI perform in a way that’s rough and scratchy.
Hold that thought.
Last Christmas we were riding the first big wave of Generative AI brouhaha on the back of ChatGPT's emergence into the world. It was launched to the public at the end of November 2022 and there was already a huge amount of speculation as people tried to get their heads around what it all might mean. A world full of shit computer-generated poetry? Shit poetry in a pirate voice? The annihilation of humankind?
It's funny to think that in just over a year we've tumbled through various states of AI gloom and AI boom and endless takes on its impact, but no-one's really that much the wiser. So while the discourse around AI feels firmly part of the mainstream and there are no shortage of big opinions (ahem), we're all still clutching at straws.
Ghost of Christmas present: a gift that keeps giving
This is roughly the version of events that contributed to me writing this post:
Last Saturday morning I tried to complete the local Parkrun but dropped out after three-or-so kilometres due to my mildly arthritic foot and excessive pre-Christmas eating.
My friend Rob finished it in a time that was slow for him, but still faster than my personal best will ever be. There was some general post-run chit chat, and Rob recounted the music he’d been listening to while he ran. One of the artists he mentioned was Kae Tempest.
Later that morning I started drafting a few words when I found five minutes to spare. A couple of paragraphs started taking shape, but nothing was quite nailing it.
In the afternoon my family were putting up our Christmas tree and I decided to play some music to provide a bit of gentle distraction.
Following Rob’s earlier tip-off, I stuck on Kae Tempest’s The Line Is A Curve as I hadn’t heard it in a while and it's an absolute powerhouse of an album (although perhaps not the most festive 🤣) which kept me sane during the annual untangling of the fairy lights.
While I listened a recent post by Phil Adams floated into my head. In it he wonderfully articulates his concerns around, to paraphrase, AI sucking the life out of creativity. He quotes Kae Tempest’s short-but-beautifully-formed book On Connection a couple of times - helping to highlight the often profound and unexpected links between humans and art in its many forms.
Andrew Blance picked up on a similar theme in a post from Waterstons Innovation last week, riffing off a quote from Simpsons' writer John Swartzwelder on the importance of getting a 'lousy' but functional first draft of a script on the go as a springboard to more creative outpourings.
It's a brilliant little encapsulation of where ideas come from, and how important a role 'farting about' can play in the process of coming up with stuff. As with Phil's piece, it throws up pertinent questions about the role of AI in the creative process.
When I start writing one of >these< I usually tip-tap a few ideas on my iPhone and then clean them up on my laptop when I’ve got time later on. Sometimes I can dash a draft off in an hour, sometimes it can take days and endless restarts. I haven't yet sat down purposefully to compose something - modern life gets in the way - but that means thoughts and ideas get the chance to percolate in my head.
And the point that I'm trying to get to in the world's longest preamble is that the percolation is the really important part.
To allow me to write these words now my thoughts had to bounce around over the course of a day - from a run, to a conversation, to solving a problem, to listening to music, to recalling some writing, to thinking about some other writing, and then on to typing stuff in five-to-ten minute snatches over the course of the following week and loosely stitch it all together.
To be clear, there are no delusions of grandeur here, I'm not saying what I write is some great work of art - it's a wee newsletter with a few tens of subscribers that I get a lot of personal enjoyment from scribing (and hopefully others get a modicum of enjoyment from reading). But I do think it's important to acknowledge the diverse array of human connections and experiences that helped me put it together.
And so, when I'm sitting trying to get some generative AI software to make a picture look a little less polished, a little more work-in-progress, slightly rougher round the edges and I can't because it only wants to output stuff with a weird other-worldly sheen, and people with flawless skin and bold heroic expressions, and stereotypical 'masculine' and 'feminine' shapes, it highlights just how back-to-front things can get.
With generative AI you get an end result based on the mass consumption of other end results. Maybe that's fine if you're content with an anodyne version of the world, but I'd argue creativity needs a backstory. Others may take a different position, but a genuine backstory depends on an array of unpredictable, unmeasurable, and (importantly) unprogrammable connections.
As Phil more eloquently puts it:
"So many advocates of generative AI talk about hacks and short-cuts. By using AI you outsource and lose the benefits of the creative journey."
To go back to my opening question - the creative spark 🎇 for this post may have come about 10am last Saturday, but the inspiration is steeped in years of lived experience.
Ghost of Christmas future: healthy scepticism
I suspect there will be an onslaught of 2024 predictions in the next couple of weeks, so I won't make any here other than to state there's probably going to be quite a bit of AI in the mix.
And rather than get embroiled in speculation my main recommendation is to treat anything that's declared with certainty about the future of technology with at least a tiny bit of scepticism.
For example, PwC boldly predicted that AI could be contributing $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, McKinsey bumped for the slightly more conservative $13 trillion (which one is it lads?!?!). Note the use of the word 'could' (and its bedfellow 'potentially') in these impressively large made-up numbers and think about who stands to make money out of consultancy based on this kind of spin.
We could all be having our work Christmas lunches in the Metaverse; we could all be buying presents for our loved ones with Bitcoin, but by and large I suspect that's not the case.
On the flipside, earlier in the year there was a slew of panic stories about ChatGPT being used by children to cheat at their schoolwork, which turns out to be far less of an issue than the Daily Mail might have led you to believe (according to some, y'know, actual methodological research by Pew and Stanford).
I'm not saying to make 2024 the year you become a crotchety old contrarian like me, but I’d encourage everyone to not be afraid of playing the long game, take some time to dig deep, and try and always look for a range of points of view when you're venturing into a brave new technological space.
Have a peaceful festive season 🕊️