It depends on what you mean by “safe”. I don’t think anything will remain untouched by AI in some way or another in the next 5-10 years, digital or not (if we don’t get all killed by then). But that doesn’t mean that things will simply be removed, or completely automated. Photography has profoundly changed painting: instead of replacing them, it has freed artists from painting naturalistically. Maybe image generators do the same again, in a different way.
I’m a novelist. While ChatGPT can’t write a novel yet, GPT-X may be able to do so, so I’m certainly not “safe”. But that will not stop me from writing, and hopefully, it won’t stop people from reading my stories, knowing that they were written by a human being. I think it’s likely that the publishing industry will be overturned, but human storytelling probably won’t go away. Maybe the same is true for writing code: It may be transformed from something tedious you do to automate boring tasks to a form of art, just like painting was transformed from copying a real image onto a canvas to expressing images that exist only in your head.
I had a similar discussion with a tattoo artist two days ago. Tattoo machines will exist, but some people will prefer to be tattooed by an artist because of his style, his talent, and his humanity. You can prove that you are a human tattoo artist by tattooing the client, so AI is not a problem here. As for the writings produced by a human being, I wonder how you can prove to the readers that you are the author of your writings and not an artificial intelligence. I wonder the same thing about digital pictures or musical composition.
Sure, you can do things for your own enjoyment, even if an AI automates them.
Maybe as a writer, you’ll have to spend some time in a room with cameras when you’re writing so that everyone can prove that you wrote your content and not an AI.
Live arts performances could become much more common, just so people can say it’s art made entirely by humans.
Live arts performances could become much more common, just so people can say it’s art made entirely by humans.
Yes, that’s an important point.
I don’t think that proving that I’m really the one who wrote a novel will be a big issue. It’s not that hard to believe, since people have written novels for millennia and I already have published books pre-GPT. Of course, there may be impostors, claiming to have written a novel that is in fact computer generated, but what would be the point? During a public reading, I usually not only read from my novel but also talk about my motivation to write it, the thoughts that went into it, answer questions, etc. That would be hard to fake I guess.
The bigger problem I see is not that GPT-X will be a competing novelist but that it will turn out to be the villain in one of my books, like my new novel VIRTUA.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about the fact that you have several books to your credit and so people know that you have writing skills. The public can trust you because they know your past work.
Yes, human beings could easily question a person’s creations by asking about their technique, their writing choices, their artistic choices, their aspirations. I hadn’t thought of that.
I’m trying to predict what’s going to happen in the very near future but it’s very difficult. In 2012 we thought we would have autonomous cars in 2022 and that the tools of creativity were very hypothetical. The opposite has happened.
I’m trying to predict what’s going to happen in the very near future but it’s very difficult. In 2012 we thought we would have autonomous cars in 2022 and that the tools of creativity were very hypothetical. The opposite has happened.
Making predictions is indeed difficult, especially about the future, as Mark Twain observed. :)
However, I think you have an important point here. People tend to make predictions about AI based on the assumption that humans are the benchmark for everything and somehow very special, in particular concerning creativity. So it must be much easier to automate driving than writing a creative text. Many argue that what ChatGPT outputs is not creative, but “just statistics”, even though it is every bit as original as most of what humans can create.
I’ve known for quite some time that “creativity” mostly means recombining original thoughts made by others. Most of our modern novels are based on concepts that the ancient Greeks invented, for instance. You cannot write a novel without first having read a few hundred novels written by others, and I owe most of my creative process to the inspiration I get from authors like Stanislav Lem, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and many others.
Creativity is not a magical, mysterious process that only humans can do. For example, I have a set of “story cards”, divided into “setting”, “character”, and “plot”, which I sometimes use to generate story ideas. They are not generating complete, detailed storys, of course, but they still show that a large part of the creative process is just random combination. I even wrote an essay for a German magazine in 2009, arguing that the greatest artist of the 21st century might be a machine. At the time, I didn’t expect this to happen during my lifetime, though.
As you say, we reason too much with our current knowledge, like every society in the past that thought it understood everything about the universe.
Some people suggest Dyson spheres and Von Neumann probes, but an advanced AI could very well find these inventions unnecessary to build and imagine many other things to prioritize goals that we don’t know yet.
It depends on what you mean by “safe”. I don’t think anything will remain untouched by AI in some way or another in the next 5-10 years, digital or not (if we don’t get all killed by then). But that doesn’t mean that things will simply be removed, or completely automated. Photography has profoundly changed painting: instead of replacing them, it has freed artists from painting naturalistically. Maybe image generators do the same again, in a different way.
I’m a novelist. While ChatGPT can’t write a novel yet, GPT-X may be able to do so, so I’m certainly not “safe”. But that will not stop me from writing, and hopefully, it won’t stop people from reading my stories, knowing that they were written by a human being. I think it’s likely that the publishing industry will be overturned, but human storytelling probably won’t go away. Maybe the same is true for writing code: It may be transformed from something tedious you do to automate boring tasks to a form of art, just like painting was transformed from copying a real image onto a canvas to expressing images that exist only in your head.
I had a similar discussion with a tattoo artist two days ago. Tattoo machines will exist, but some people will prefer to be tattooed by an artist because of his style, his talent, and his humanity. You can prove that you are a human tattoo artist by tattooing the client, so AI is not a problem here.
As for the writings produced by a human being, I wonder how you can prove to the readers that you are the author of your writings and not an artificial intelligence. I wonder the same thing about digital pictures or musical composition.
Sure, you can do things for your own enjoyment, even if an AI automates them.
Maybe as a writer, you’ll have to spend some time in a room with cameras when you’re writing so that everyone can prove that you wrote your content and not an AI.
Live arts performances could become much more common, just so people can say it’s art made entirely by humans.
Edit: English grammar.
Yes, that’s an important point.
I don’t think that proving that I’m really the one who wrote a novel will be a big issue. It’s not that hard to believe, since people have written novels for millennia and I already have published books pre-GPT. Of course, there may be impostors, claiming to have written a novel that is in fact computer generated, but what would be the point? During a public reading, I usually not only read from my novel but also talk about my motivation to write it, the thoughts that went into it, answer questions, etc. That would be hard to fake I guess.
The bigger problem I see is not that GPT-X will be a competing novelist but that it will turn out to be the villain in one of my books, like my new novel VIRTUA.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about the fact that you have several books to your credit and so people know that you have writing skills. The public can trust you because they know your past work.
Yes, human beings could easily question a person’s creations by asking about their technique, their writing choices, their artistic choices, their aspirations. I hadn’t thought of that.
I’m trying to predict what’s going to happen in the very near future but it’s very difficult. In 2012 we thought we would have autonomous cars in 2022 and that the tools of creativity were very hypothetical. The opposite has happened.
Making predictions is indeed difficult, especially about the future, as Mark Twain observed. :)
However, I think you have an important point here. People tend to make predictions about AI based on the assumption that humans are the benchmark for everything and somehow very special, in particular concerning creativity. So it must be much easier to automate driving than writing a creative text. Many argue that what ChatGPT outputs is not creative, but “just statistics”, even though it is every bit as original as most of what humans can create.
I’ve known for quite some time that “creativity” mostly means recombining original thoughts made by others. Most of our modern novels are based on concepts that the ancient Greeks invented, for instance. You cannot write a novel without first having read a few hundred novels written by others, and I owe most of my creative process to the inspiration I get from authors like Stanislav Lem, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and many others.
Creativity is not a magical, mysterious process that only humans can do. For example, I have a set of “story cards”, divided into “setting”, “character”, and “plot”, which I sometimes use to generate story ideas. They are not generating complete, detailed storys, of course, but they still show that a large part of the creative process is just random combination. I even wrote an essay for a German magazine in 2009, arguing that the greatest artist of the 21st century might be a machine. At the time, I didn’t expect this to happen during my lifetime, though.
As you say, we reason too much with our current knowledge, like every society in the past that thought it understood everything about the universe.
Some people suggest Dyson spheres and Von Neumann probes, but an advanced AI could very well find these inventions unnecessary to build and imagine many other things to prioritize goals that we don’t know yet.