It is clear that chatGPT and other generative forms of artificial intelligence have catapulted into the general public’s consciousness and created a mixture of fear, glee and unlimited pontificating. The usual suspects who leap onto technology bandwagons are, of course, leading the charge. They have dumped crypto and found a new, even sexier infatuation.
The prospect of generative AI saturating our society with fake news, deep fake videos and photos and other chaos-creating content is disturbing, to say the least. One doubts that there is any means to stem that onslaught and the task of distinguishing truth from lie will grow progressively more challenging.
But in addition to that inevitable scourge, there is the somewhat dispiriting prospect of people using chatbots to do most if not all of their creative work – writing emails, letters and essays; creating videos or photo albums; coming up with poems, songs and melodies. One can only imagine the nightmare for school teachers and professors in trying to assess the capabilities of their students. Or perhaps the only skill necessary or assessed in the future will be the ability to guide the generative AI to whatever end product one desires?
We are reassured by some pundits that human creativity will not be in jeopardy because we are uniquely capable of innovation and modes of thought that computers cannot replicate. But is this really true? AI learns from data that it consumes. Don’t humans do the same? Isn’t our entire life a consumption of data? We use the books we read, the music we heard, the conversations we had, the movies and series we watched to construct new thoughts, new ideas, and these are the sources for all our creative output.
It is true that there are subtleties to human thought and feeling that are more difficult to imagine being mastered by AI – irony, humor, sarcasm, empathy, sorrow, ecstasy, to name a few. But these are also acquired over years of training and interaction. A newborn has no empathy, no irony, no sarcasm. Would it be so difficult for a computer to likewise be introduced to all of these and become conversant with them?
Most of us would like to believe that there is some aspect of the human brain or ‘spirit’, something beyond the purely material realm, that gives us our ‘humanity’ and our moral and ethical compass. But others are at peace with the idea that human beings are simply incredibly complex and beautiful machines.
I suspect that the next few years will bring us the rather depressing realization that human creativity is not all that amazing after all. We will find that a chatbot can come up with a catchy tune and lyric that rivals the Beatles or Cole Porter, or a novel that would make F. Scott Fitzgerald envious.
But then again, maybe after all is said and done, we will find that there is that certain ineffable genius of human creativity that is missing in the deluge of content created by generative AI. And we may find ourselves all the poorer for having allowed it to dominate our world. Who can say?
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