party crasher
when will AI kick the artist to the curb?
you shall know a word by the company it keeps - John Firth
Did you know that machine learning can identify words that are often linked metaphorically? If you’re a poet, you have already grasped the implication.
A writer can speed up the process of creating a poem by using AI to identify potential metaphors.
Should such a writer acknowledge the use of AI in creating the forementioned poem if it only helped? Or is that like using a thesaurus and not worth mentioning?
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp took a porcelain urinal and named it Fountain. His contention was that as an artist, he possessed the authority to classify an ordinary object as art.
This begged the question, how do we define art in the modern era? Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism followed in the wake of Duchamp’s pronouncement and continued to redefine the boundaries of art.
One hundred years give or take later, if I give instructions to an AI art program and after five or fifty of its attempts, I declare its final effort art and then print, frame and sell it am I a creator or something lesser?
I certainly would have put more effort into the creative process than Duchamp did with Fountain. But is that enough?
If I reframe my earlier question by asking what if I’m using an AI poetry generator and provide it with specific instructions and after it generates one hundred different poems, I select my favorite or mix and match lines and then post it on Vocal, am I a poet or something lesser? A discerning reader perhaps?
Before my loyal readers begin tossing bric-a-brac at their computer screens or winging their phones into nearby ponds, do not worry, I do not use AI for art or writing of any form. Hell, I don’t even use it for research.
But what happens when we can no longer tell the difference?
I’m just a messenger from a potential future asking questions. You may want to save your angry fusillades for when the future starts answering them.
I’m sure most if not all of you have received comments on your stories, articles and poetry that were whole or in part generated by AI. In the beginning, they were easy to ID because they were essentially cliff note explanations of the story.
But recently I received a couple AI comments that were far more sophisticated than what I had encountered before. In both cases I was able to identify the fraud because the program failed to decipher the difference between fantasy and reality or the grasp my use of metaphor.
Although the comments came from two different commenters, I'm fairly confident that they were written by the same program. This is the first four sentences from one of the comments, this one to my story the still and silent walls:
This description of the old house's memories is really vivid. It makes me think about the stories old buildings could tell. I've seen some old structures that seem to hold so much history. How do you think we could better preserve these memories locked within places like this house? And what kind of impact do you think it has on the people who grew up around such buildings?
I've highlighted the howlers. If the narrator of my story had been a person, this section of the comments would have been rational. But fortunately or at least unfortunately for Tweedle Dum (not the commenters real name), it was the walls in the house.
But it gets even dumber in the final three sentences (my comments are bracketed).
It's amazing how it (the walls) remembers all those different times. I wonder what it would be like to be that house, (do you really wonder this?) to have witnessed so much change. Do you think there are other places out there with equally rich, untold stories like this one? (Buildings witnessing history is a metaphor. Damn fella! Just damn!)
Some of you may take comfort in this as evidence that AI will never take the place of a creative. But sadly, I do not. As ridiculous as that paragraph is, it is evidence of a program trying to engage with the text at a human level.
Once it learns to do that fully I won't be able to tell the difference anymore. Will you?
About the Creator
John Cox
Twisted teller of mind bending tales. I never met a myth I didn't love or a subject that I couldn't twist out of joint. I have a little something for almost everyone here. Cept AI. Aint got none of that.
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Comments (20)
This is all very alarming really isn't? I grew up in the 80s, well born 80, so in the wake of Terminator and lots of continued jokes about Skynet and AI turning on us. Whereas so far, the truth is far from that, but it has become detrimental to us in many different ways. It's funny you mentioned Duchamp, cos I did an article about him a while back, I think as part of my ABCommunities thing for Art. Anyway, I think there's a stark difference, kinda like Randy said, between art that has been generated with more than just a helping hand (that's how I'd describe it if the last scenario you painted was used) and Duchamp, a clever man, taking a urinal and calling it art. Yes, the parameters of what is and what isn't art is being expanded constantly and that's kinda what makes it great. Things become more accessible to people. etc. However, I don't think AI qualifies. Or if it does, we need to put it in a separate category, or give it a separate category, so that we can keep organic human writing pure? Maybe that's the way forward? Like...DJs and producers who make EDM, and use hardly any or none at all organic instruments. I love that type of music and consider it music, though there are a lot of purists out there who would say electronic music is just pushing buttons etc. It's scary that we are getting to the point of finding it harder to tell. And yes, I've had lots of those comments. Loved this article and belated congrats on Top Story, sir!
This was a conversation that needed to be had, one that makes my heart race and my eye balls explode. The somber tone of this piece, and how you managed to hold it all the way through, really makes this nightmare feel like it has no end. The Al generated comments you had on your own written work, scares me... Is effort becoming extinct... It's scary how we are advancing into oblivion. Going from using a thesaurus, to needing Al to piece words and stories together for us, rather than braving the sweat and tears of creating our own. This temptation will never reach me, not in comments and certainly not in poems or stories. Thank you for writing this informative and well written piece, for us to — in a sense— vent a little.
Look, if I wanted horror content, I'd have gone to the Horror Community 😱
Well-wrought, John. I've noticed the uptick in questioning too. I suspect this is to get the engagement. I've been ignoring these. Another dead giveaway is that it tends to trace back to a profile selling something or running a business. As writing is more a spiritual than monetary pursuit for me, I think of what Thomas Aquinas was rumored to say at the end of his days: "The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me." It is in the act of creation that we experience revelation. Can AI exprience this? This remains an open question...
It's funny because as an editor on another platform, I am pretty good at detecting AI-generated content, but for some reason, AI comments on Vocal feell like a whole new ball field. I appreciate this information, and it tells me I have still much to learn. Congrats on your top story, John!
Thanks for your insightful story. I’m not great at detecting AI comments, I have suspicions, check their profile, but am not confident. Thanks for this.✅
From time to time I take a look at Fountain in Tate Modern in London and ponder its meaning, along with various other icons of 20th century art. If you use an AI program to create a work of art, you are the artist. The AI is no more the creator of the work than a camera is creator of a photograph. AI cannot create art, it cannot create anything, because it is a computer program, a series of pre-programmed (all be they complex) electronic calculations. It is interesting to see how well that AI is now able to approximate and imitate human intellectual function. This ability is developing at an accelerating rate. When I look at a TV screen, I am convinced that I am looking at people moving around and talking but, of course, what I am looking at is a series of still images, captured by a digital camera, recorded and transmitted through wires and sometimes radio signals, that excites the photosensitive cells on the retina of my eyes and then creates an illusion of images in my imaginative brain. AI is just another computer program that does this kind of thing in an ever-more elaborate way. Sometimes its hard now to tell the difference between what is created by human ingenuity and what is created by the product of human ingenuity. Interesting article and thanks for sharing John.
I get approached on Linked In to write for AI companies to make their product more human. I could never do it. I think I'd rather clean the streets. This was incredibly thought-provoking as well as well-written, humanly so.
Back to say congratulations on your Top Story! 🎉💖🎊🎉💖🎊
It is getting harder to figure out who is what or is it whom? I'm not sure, let me ask the box. Interesting assessment, John.
mine will be evidant by the spelling...see? lol
I've been seeing these types of comments recent as well. So far, it's easy to tell, but I agree, it's going to become more difficult as these bots get "smarter."
Great
This is excellent, John, but also thought-provoking in quite a sad way. When you ask "But what happens when we can no longer tell the difference?" all I could think is we're pretty much there already. Just in the last couple months AI has progressed a lot in its ability to humanize stories and poems so much that they're incredibly hard to detect. I've received a few comments like the ones you've shared here. The elevated analysis with a question at the end seems to be the new formula. But it can be hard to keep up. Unfortunately I think especially with micros and poetry those "discerning readers" are going to pass a lot of AI jigsawing off as their own creations
Now I want to bookmark this page and see if an AI commentator comes through and just what they’ll pull out of it. If they do, I believe we’ll need a follow up article.
I've been seeing comments like this a lot lately. From different people on different pieces and it always ends with one or two questions. That pattern alone was enough for me to know these were all AI-Generated comments. Like the comments below mine here. But some people still reply them thinking they're genuine
This is some thought-provoking stuff. The idea of using AI for art and writing raises a lot of questions. I can see how it could be useful for generating ideas, but where do we draw the line between using it as a tool and taking credit for its output? It's similar to using a thesaurus. If it just helps a bit, do we need to mention it? And like you said, how do we define art and creativity in this new age? It makes me wonder what the future holds for these fields.
To me what makes Duchamp's "Fountain" art is the meaning with which he infused it by naming it so. As such it transcends its basest of origins & abandonment as refuse & becomes an invitation to his mind & commentary upon his craft, the world of art, & the world itself. The same is true for the written word. The text may read exactly the same, but knowing its origin infuses it with a vast & varied range of meaning depending upon that origin. Should that understanding of origin prove to be wrong (or even simply not sufficiently nuanced), that may very well cause my impression of the work (& myself) to shift, perhaps even grow or begin to blossom. If AI should happen to develop to the point where it can help unlock human potential & the secrets of the heart, if it should become so good at its "craft" that it has the power to move, impassion, dissect, build up, destroy that which is false, embolden all that is good & true, etc., I shall not see that as anything ominous. The portion of art's equation which involves the recipient or beholder will remain the same. The greater concern for me lies with our failure as recipients to discern, especially that which is true & good from that which is false & wicked. (Understanding that as with beauty, truth & good lie in the heart of the beholder. For me, I would boil that down to the one constant found in every single last one of the world's major religions, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," the Golden Rule.) For example, someone viewing Duchamp's "Fountain" may find in it a call to arms against any public funding for the arts (or even as a call to tear all public urinals from their places of installation), while others might find in it a call to rise from our baser instincts as it might concern public discourse, artistic merit, or even public amenities. In another case, we might consider the art of rhetoric as championed by Aristotle. An accomplished rhetorician has the power to champion causes & inflame our passions, but only if we who hear them allow it. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lifted up & ennobled our spirits to a higher calling (as most would agree today), but a huge number of those who heard his words found themselves enraged & did all within their power to silence him. In a very different manner, Adolf Hitler used his rhetorical skills to enrage a nation, plunge the world into war, & inflict his "final solution" on Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, etc. in such a manner that most of the rest of us beholding his "art" said, "Never again." The issue for me lies not within the artist & their art but within the discernment of those who receive it.
Scary question to ponder at the end... There needs to be some type of mandatory regulation for the use of AI. It's obvious that it will continue to learn until it's indiscernible. I don't want to talk to computers. I prefer humans. This is where technology is going too far. Build robots all you want but leave the internet to us... 🤬 Perfect title for this piece by the way.
We are in this strange stage of life. Like many of our ancestors who scorned progress. Yet i feel this is different. WIthout creativity what is there? Social skills is in rapid decline and people who take credit for saomething they did not create is in my mind theft, or a con. Time will tell.