2022-09-04T21:31:43+05:30
The price-winning artwork created by an AI image generator. (Photo credit: Twitter@rgshanbhag)
A US game designer won first place in the emerging artist division’s ‘digital arts/manipulated photography category’ at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. The win came with a $300 cash prize. Good for him.
One catch: Jason M Allen’s winning piece of art, ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’ (French for Space Opera Theatre) was produced by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence system, an image generator open for public use.
That is what the other artists had to say when the story of Allen’s win went viral on Twitter. Many pointed to competition win as a sign that the creative job market is going to be taken over by AI.
One Twitter user went so far as to say that if even creative jobs are not safe from machines, then high-skill jobs, in general, are at risk of becoming obsolete.
We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes — if creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete
What will we have then?
The competition winner Jasm M Allen disagrees with that assessment and states that his input was crucial to the creation of his art piece, a striking blend of renaissance-style imagery with a steampunk theme.
Allen even noted that AI-generated art could even become its own art category in the future.
The controversy sparked by the competition is part of the much larger and longer-running debate over whether AIs will eventually make human beings obsolete on all fronts.
In 2017, management consulting giant McKinsey put out a paper predicting that widespread automation could affect anywhere between 75 to 375 million workers worldwide by 2030, causing them to change jobs as automation partially or fully displaces many occupations.
In 2020, McKinsey noted that the challenges faced by businesses during COVID-19 will only accelerate the widespread adoption of automation and AIs.
But the fear is not simply that AIs and machines, in general, are coming for all our jobs. There are those like Tesla boss Elon Musk who have compared the development and use of AIs to “summoning a demon”, noting that artificial intelligence could quickly overtake humans and their capability to keep their creations under control.
Musk is not alone in raising the alarm. One of the most prolific scientific minds of our time, Stephen Hawking, once stated that AI could bring about an end to mankind as it could rapidly evolve to outpace humans in all fields as we are limited by slow biological evolution.
Ominous warnings of the future aside, science fiction is brimming with AIs like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and SHODAN from the System Shock series who view humans as little more than obsolete sacks of meat who are fit to only be ruled, or in more drastic cases, pushed to extinction.
But before you feel the primitive need to reach for a pitchfork and torch, let us consider the flipside. Consider a future where humanity’s problems can be solved with a press of a button.
A future where humanity can cheat disease and natural disaster, one where people no longer have to live mundane lives and perform trivial tasks, leaving them free to instead live mundane digital lives in the metaverse.
Well, this future may well be possible and it will be AI that can lead us in this direction. Much like automation that came before it, AI has the potential to make our lives safer and more stress-free, all in pursuit of an ideal future where humanity is no longer bogged down by biological constraints.
The promise of AI aside, it should also be noted that automation and now AIs have always been subject to bad press and paranoia born of poor understanding.
While it is true that automation has taken jobs, it has also created many other new jobs in return. More relevant to the discussion of the AI-winning art prizes is the fact that AIs, so far, cannot replicate true creativity.
AIs can study the human creative process and mimic it. It can even help humans in their creative endeavours but it cannot replicate the inherent spark of inspiration that drives human creativity.
As for genocidal death robots and god-complex AIs? Well, that is a danger that humanity may have to accept and deal with in return for the promised utopia of the future.
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