Why be a creative with the coming rise in Artificial Intelligence? All career decisions are big decisions. This is not just about creatives. AI is going to create havoc and slam a ton of professions. Even evil-doers. Already, hackers have co-opted AI to write 100% believable phishing emails that have stolen a crap-ton of personal data and money from humans.
Just yesterday, 7/25/23, the good folks at OpenAI shut down their ChatGPT detection tool because it was not reliable. They promise to bring out a new tool soon. I suspect in the interim, the ChatBot will learn how to out-think the puny humans that wrote the new tool.
AI will slam unlikely professions. It’s going to hit cardiologists. You’ll take your symptoms to Dr. AI. It’ll write orders for the proper tests. It will know what tests to run based on information gleaned from millions of journal articles and case reports. Once the labs are back, based on the appropriate articles and case reports, Dr. AI prescribes the correct meds, and/or steer you to a physician for the correct invasive procedure. And then humans, guided by robots, will do the work. You might prefer a human doctor. But a lot of our health care decisions are made for us by managed care and the insurance industry.
Radiologists, too. Dr-AI will scan your film, compare it to millions of other x-rays and CT scans and MRIs and decipher, with near-perfect certainty, what are the health issues at hand. On the other hand, ER docs will always be needed. Stitches and casts and such are, for the time being, a hands-on experience. Doctors and nurses ,et al, will always be a part of healthcare delivery. People will always want and need the human touch. But how their roles will be carried out will change mightily. There will certainly come a time when robots are safer and more accurate than even the best humans.
As for creatives, I believe that front-line work will always exist. Game descriptions in sports, reporters doing criminal pieces, live photography of events, boots-on-the ground reports, will always be around. Until AI figures out how to send video robots out on the scene to shoot video and write eye-witness reports, that is.
The week of July 19, I read of a guy who created a big photo album of his trip to NYC with a buddy. Except, he and his buddy never went to NYC. They used AI programs to create images of themselves, and then manipulated photos of New York scenes with their avatars to create the happy images of a vacation. All of their friends believed that the photos were real memories of the trip. The images were that good.
I do a fair amount of voice-over and audiobook narration. That I know of, I’ve already lost three gigs to Voice.AI. Those old computer voices on YouTube vids are garbage. The new Voice.AI is very good. It even inserts the odd pauses or breath sounds just as people would do. Within 2–3 years, you will ask the machine for a Samuel L. Jackson voice or Neil Gaimon or Helen Mirren type voice and it will sound enough like them to evoke good feelings, yet not so close to attract an intellectual property lawsuit. It takes me 2 weeks minimum to complete a book. I have to record raw audio, do the production work to sound all deep and resonant, then edit the audio to eliminate my flubs and the spots where I curse out loud as I mispronounce Avenue des Champs-Élysées six times in a row. VoiceAI will do the entire book in a few moments. I earn a nice share of book sales for my work. VoiceAI is cheap, even right now. Publishers like cheap. More profit for them.
I have a graphic designer friend. He’s lost several clients to Dall-e. Dall-e is an AI program that does graphics and photos and such. I tried to recommend my friend to a guy doing a start-up. He said, “Nah, I’m using Dall-e for my stuff. It looks great.” And he was not wrong. It did look great.
Picture the AI taught classroom of 2028. Each student at a screen, interacting with a teacher’s image that resonates perfectly within the student’s psyche and designed to teach in a style that clicks all the boxes for that student. Amazing, and horribly distressing.
School boards will love it. It’ll be dirt-cheap compared to real teachers. Politicians will love it — Look at those test scores without all those demon groomer indoctrinator teachers. I am not sure what will happen to kids’ social skills but it won’t be pretty. Unchecked, that is the future of education. No teachers needed. FYI- I taught HS for 20 years.
Here’s the bit that’s eye-opening. In the scheme of things, AI is embryonic. Like an in-utero undifferentiated clump of cells embryonic. The AI we’ll use in 3–5 years will be like a teenage Stephen Hawking. And in 10 years, since the language learning AI models learn at exponential rates, we won’t recognize it at all. It will be breathtaking.
But I digress. It’ll be a while before the impacts are felt across all worlds of creation. But it’s coming.
You might know that I’m a poet, with over 200 sonnets out there. Two months back, I asked Chat GPT to write a sonnet. It was utter garbage. This morning, July 20, I asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet in the style of me. This sonnet is not garbage.
In canine realm, a loyal heart we find,
Where friendship’s flame, with fervor, brightly burns,
A faithful soul, of purest love, aligned,
A bond so deep, to cherish and discern.
Through fields of green, they dance with joyful grace,
Unleashing boundless spirits, running free,
In eyes, an innocence we can’t erase,
Their love, a gift that fills our hearts with glee.
From puppy’s paw to wisdom’s grizzled grey,
Their presence warms the depths of every soul,
A guardian, companion, night and day,
In tales of love and loyalty they roll.
So raise a toast to dogs, forever true,
Their love, a beacon bright, for me and you.
Still, I believe there will always be a place for the human hand in the arts. Human music will incorporate AI in the same way that we adopted first the synthesizer, MIDI, and later, beats and sampling. AI will be used by the fine arts in the same way. There will always be a place for live music and theatre. Nothing will replace that.
Simultaneously, we will see the rise of the machine-based creative arts as an entirely different sort of art that I can’t quite imagine just yet. I’m not ready to short the stock of the human race. But we need to recognize that the AI we see today is not even a Model-T in the scheme of things. It’s a tiny working model of an internal combustion engine sitting on a lab bench in Dearborn. Un-managed, in 3 years, AI be the equivalent of the Jetsons’ Flying Car.
In 5 years, let me put it this way. Remember in Star Trek-the Next Generation when the slightly demented prankster Q introduced the Picard and his crew to the Borg? Q, you might recall (Wikipedia) “is an extra-dimensional being of unknown origin who possesses immeasurable power over time, space, the laws of physics, and reality itself, being capable of altering it to his whim. Despite his vast knowledge and experience spanning untold eons, he is not above practical jokes for his own personal amusement, for a Machiavellian or manipulative purpose, or to prove a point. He is said to be almost completely omnipotent.”
Q says to Jean-Luc, “You are not even close to being ready for them. Not for thousands of millennia are you ready” ( or words to that effect).
Yeah, us neither.
In 1965, Gordon Moore devised his now-famous Moore’s Law about transistors and chips and computing speed and price. I’m of the mind that AI will accelerate even more quickly. I also think it will overtake us far more rapidly than we’ve predicted.
Humans being humans, we will think we can handle it, that we are in charge, yet our hubris will get us in the end. The human track record of safe utilization of technology is not good. We figured out how to burn coal and manufacture internal combustion engines and we’ve just about burned our world to a crisp and brought the oceans to a boil. We invented a chemical to destroy the mosquitoes that spread malaria and we darned near managed to eradicate a huge number of bird species. We put cell phones and tablets in our cars and were shocked to find that accidents and deaths went through the roof.
I love the cool stuff that tech does, yet I am very much not bullish on our ability to manage this technology. Our history as a species speaks volumes to my anxiety. I would like to think that we are on the doorstep of some wonderful new world. I am afraid that when we open that door, it’ll open into a Brave New World ruled not by Our Ford but by Our Bot.
