156 - Centaurs vs Terminators: Who would win? 👨🐴💥🤖
Clickbait note: It’s about AI, not actually centaurs and terminators :D
Hey there, !
I write a lot about AI art - DALL-E 2, Google Imagen, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Craiyon. It’s one of the interesting things I’ve been following over the last few months. I’m probably going to write more about this because I think it’s interesting, so if you don’t like it skip to the end as usual :)
This piece is a very specific rebuttal to a vibe I was seeing on Twitter about artists who were scared about being replaced by AI.
The artists who are worried about AI stealing their jobs are absolutely right to do so.
My first instinct was just like…so what? AI art is super cool, and does it really matter if there are ways for people to do art who can’t do art?
Specifically, me?
I suck at art, at digital art, at painting…at any type of drawing types that are supposed to translate my brain to real life.
I did think about it from artist’s point of view - I could see how it was scary to have AI supplant your job, but all I could think was: welcome to the world.
Welcome to the world
For the longest time, the AI goalposts have shifted. We used to think that technology was just something that could automate calculations, or do repetitive tasks quicker, or on the other end of the scale, AI was just too good in movies (Skynet, HAL, JARVIS, Terminators).
In a lot of these cases, technology did take over some jobs, automating people who would have to update spreadsheets, or to do scheduling, or to update a list somewhere on a text file, or data upload to a random database. These people ‘lost’ their jobs, and new ones were created in their place.
This pattern happens in a lot of industries - with people being scared that they’re losing their jobs (which, they are) but trying to preserve the present rather than adapt to the future. Luddites, the lot of ‘em.
And now, it’s encroaching on art.
The ever-improving AI
The development of AI only grows. It doesn’t stagnate, or stay in place, or stop. It pushes forward incessantly, conquering what has come before it like lava - slowly eating away at the land as it pushes forward.
As bullish as I am about AI, I naively thought that there was a level it would never get to, which was human creativity and emotion.
I used to think that there would be no way that an AI, or a computer, would be able to replicate emotion that they cannot feel, and cannot learn. Many science fiction authors convinced me that even if robots or AI could seem to be emotional, they’re actually ruthless machines below the surface, and are extremely rational and logical (sometimes to a fault - again, Terminator, I,Robot, and Ex Machina).
One of the criticisms of AI art is that even if they make ‘art’, it’s just that it looks good and original - it’s really just a recombination of past images, rather than actually the creation of something new.
To which the argument would be - well, great artists steal, no? Everything we do is built off people in the past, and the recombining over and over of concepts and art means that we create the ‘new’.
Until…now?
The technology itself
Understanding what the tech actually does is probably the most important thing that artists should do. The black box nature of AI and these algorithms makes them scary, but knowing that they train on existing pictures, art, and human-created captions gives humans an edge.
There are things that AI is good at, and things that humans are good at.
In most of the AI-generated art, the ‘training’ in the back end is ‘frozen’, as in, it won’t continue to learn things after it’s already been built (or at least, not the public facing version of it). I know that this is not guaranteed forever, but what it does mean is that the use of AI art progrrams can’t be easily customised further to take advantage of new and trendy ideas.
That’s where you need skill.
Humans can adapt, and play. We have a better sense of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or nice to look at, or know when something is brave, original, or a meme. There will be things that technology will get really really good at (e.g. landscapes or art style transfers), but there’ll be things that it cannot do (e.g. riffing off the latest meme, or the imperfections of human art).
Humans have a shared context of the world, through our many sensory perceptors, as well as the experience of life. Those connections between people are unique to humanity, and cannot be copied by an AI in the same way (hope this sentence doesn’t age poorly…). That shared understanding of context, ideas, and collaboration is what can serve as our differentiated advantage over AI.
Art is not just about the raw technique of combining elements in a medium, but the idea as well. And from what I know and have seen, artists often have wonderful, original ideas that they have the technical skill to translate from their brain to reality.
AI centaurs
Centaurs have the upper body of a man, and the lower body of a horse, combining the best of both worlds. In AI land, a centaur is one where both human and AI combine to create something even better.
When AI in chess became stronger than the best human chess players, no-one stopped playing chess. Instead, we realised that we still like watching humans playing humans, we like the drama, we like the characters…AI can’t give you that. Chess players now use engines to evaluate their lines, and can progress even further to find things that engines aren’t good at.
At the noob level, chess players can use the engine to determine what a better move could have been in a situation, or gain a greater understanding of their game without needing a coach (who may be fallible as well).
If we bring this back to art, I think AI art is a great step forward. It lowers the bar for entry for people to get 30% further than they would have before with their idea. For artists who are well advanced in their skills and techniques, this is a new medium with which to experiment with - find the weak points of AI, find the place where humans can excel, and combine to win!
Always question your basics
So yes, it will make life harder for artists. But I think it’s a good challenge, as with all other careers and industries supplanted by technology and AI - how can you adapt to something new?
The basic contention of this piece is to always question your basic assumptions about things, especially strongly held beliefs about important parts of your life. What happens if your job was fully automated and taken over by AI? Where’s the niche that you can inhabit that has defensibility? In broader terms, what happens if you became homeless? What happens if you became really sick?
There are so many things that can happen to you - prepare for what you can that’s in your control, and adapt to the new when it happens.
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
-
The Sopranos - I started watching this, finally. I cannot believe it took me so long! This series is for anyone who loved the Godfather and Goodfellas, and were looking for something to continue to scratch that itch and WOW it delivers. It’s dated, yes, but it has some fantastic story, family drama, and world-building that rivals that of the Godfather. It uses a lot of assumed knowledge from those shows (and actually references them in episode 1!) but builds on it in great ways. I’ve also enjoyed watching Tony deal with his panic attacks, as it kind of reminds me of what I had been going through with them. Major recommend!
-
This is how you lose the time war - by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s a love story, kind of, between two time agents working against each other across the multiverse. It’s an extremely cute book, written as a set of letters to each other, and is written with some wonderfully beautiful prose. I’m shit at writing like that, so reading it was an absolute pleasure because it was so pretty! The only criticism I have is that the mystery is a bit too much, and though I like flowery writing, I was always waiting for the action / the letters more. It reminded me of Before Sunrise as a book that is a conversation between two people, slowly falling in love. Recommended as a short, fun, romantic sci-fi book.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
-
Human uses AI art to win an art contest - honestly, based. He used Midjourney to curate and create a piece of art, finishing it in Photoshop, and then submitting it for an art contest. Ethically, gray. But if you look at the art, it’s pretty spectacular. I enjoy the debate that this has generated - what is art? - and I think there will be new categories of art contest that are AI vs AI, Human vs Human and Centaur vs Centaur.
-
Img2Img - draw something with 5-year-old MS Paint skills, tell the computer what you were trying to make - profit? It’s SO GOOD.
-
AI-Generated Bible Art - what does the Bible look like, illustrated with AI art?