Human-made
Everything is about storytelling and storytelling is all about people.
In a TED talk on Creativity, the actor Ethan Hawke said that most people don’t think about art much ‘until their father dies…or someone breaks their heart”…or they fall wildly in love, then all of a sudden they urgently ask, “has anyone ever felt this bad (or good) before?!” It is at these times that we want something to make sense of how we’re feeling. We search for a movie, a poem, a song, a painting, anything to help us understand the world and our place in it.
Creativity and art is an act of understanding and empathy. The ability to feel and see things from another person’s perspective through the power of a creator’s imagination and our own. Implicit in this is the faith that another human being thought or felt this way too. I think it’s that human dimension that we value.
I saw a post on social media recently that got me thinking about human value or the value of humans. The sub-stack writer ‘Gurwinder’ shared a graph that showed the widening price gap between mined and lab diamonds. Gurwinder added the comment, “this is why AI art won’t ever be as valuable as human art; people don’t just buy a product, they also buy it’s provenance (story)” That feels about right to me.
The marketeer Rory Sutherland says, “value is exclusively psychological’ and that ‘value resides not in the thing itself, but in the minds of those who value it” He makes the argument that story and presentation are critical in how we ascribe value.
Or put another way, “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” Shakespeare has a quote for every occasion!
I believe we are entering a phase where provenance and the human creative fingerprint will be, more contested, yet more important and more valuable than ever.
I don’t think AI is going away, but like the lab-created diamond, AI won’t add to the perceived value of a product or work of art it will detract from it. Because of this, people and companies that use AI will seek to camouflage its use more than celebrate it
Humans tend not to value something that’s ubiquitous. When it’s useful we take it for granted, but when it’s a nuisance we bitterly resent it.
The Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari says, “in ten years algorithm and AI will be running the world” and that we will have ‘millions of AI bureaucrats making more and more decisions’ and that we will find it hard to understand the rationale behind those decisions (e.g “why was I turned down for a bank loan or failed that job interview?”). In a world where AI permeates all of our interactions, will the consumer value it or resent it? And in this world will brands really want to boast “made by AI”?
My guess is that AI use will be widespread, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, yet it use will be hidden and rarely broadcast as a selling point. We are still interested in the people that made the thing. Made by machines, isn’t as interesting a story as, made by humans.
How will this play out? When digital downloads and music streaming replaced CDs as the way people listened to music it saw an increase of popularity and hunger for the live music experience. I think AI will further amplify the younger generations fascination with old analogue technology. If you want to establish the provenance of a piece of work something like traditional film and photography tells a story that everyone can intuitively understand (e.g light exposed on to a negative then developed in a chemical process).
The other counter-reaction to AI will be a technological one. Specifically, the technology of Blockchain. Blockchain was a technology looking for a common problem to solve. AI provides that problem. Most people not involved in the creative industry might be bemused by how angry some artists are about having their work used to train AI without their permission or compensation, but everyone understands the violation of having your likeness faked and used without your consent. Fake versions of people will almost certainly be used for fraudulent purposes. Blockchain reportedly offers the means to establish authenticity and provenance. This will have value for ordinary people to protect themselves from fraud and for artists and big studios to defend their copyright from AI training sets. Gary Vaynerchuck, the Social Media Marketeer, says, that “Disney’s going to put all of their creative on the blockchain” to keep them out of the hands of generative image programmes like Mid-journey.
Blockchain has always seen as a bit of a nerdy subject, which people struggled to see a real world application for…it might be that with the arrival of AI, Blockchain’s time has come. Protecting the human, is a pretty good pitch.
An illustration I did inspired by Klara and the Sun, a book very relevant to our debates around AI and machine learning.