Into every life a little rain must fall, and, friends, it’s monsoon season!
In an ever-changing publishing world the newest challenge is AI.
You’d think I’d be thrilled. I *want* to be thrilled. I grew up on Asimov and Star Trek. I love The Murderbot Diaries and stories about Stabby the Roomba (if you know, you know). I love the idea of AI!
But there’s two things holding me back from rejoicing about this sudden abundance of AI.
1) It’s not real AI.
It’s a glorified If-Then program with lots of layers and a great PR team. Which makes it fun for certain things and useful for complex translations, but makes it a terrible substitute for human beings.
Because the current AI needs to steal to create. It can’t do anything independently. It can’t generate unique or unprompted ideas. It can’t learn. It can’t add it’s own twist to an idea.
All it can do is take from humans and reframe. And it does it without crediting sources, violating dozens of copyright laws while destroying jobs.
There is probably a use for this kind of AI. I’m sure if I thought about it I could come up with something it should be doing. But, right now, people are trying to use this not-quite-AI to drive people out of creative jobs and leave people unpaid and uncredited for their work.
I don’t like that.
No one should like that.
Creative jobs should be human jobs, because of point number two:
2) Real AI Will Not Be Human
A true, sentient AI will not a replacement for humans because it will not be human.
It won’t think like humans. It will not interact with the world like humans. It will not describe the world like humans.
The first truly AI stories are going to be alien to us. They’re going to be nothing like the human experience, and they shouldn’t be!
True AI will one day be equal to humans. It will be sentient, able to think and act for itself, and we want it to be independent from us.
We are not creating AI to create a new slave class. We know how that works, we know why slavery is horrible, their is no humanity in creating a new species simply to enslave it.
So AI can never replace human artists, authors, actors, and creators.
Someday AI will be able to act, create, paint, write, even compose songs and poetry. And hopefully we’ll be able to compare and discuss and enjoy both human and AI art. But you could never replace one with the other.
So lets go forward mindfully. Focusing on the good the If-Then programs can do without trying to steal jobs from everyone.
Humans are meant to create. We’re a storytelling species. Honoring that is more important than a billionaire getting another yacht.