I am a multidisciplinary creator. I have written and published books, plays, screenplays, and escape room games in museums. As a visual artist, I have created paintings, video art, and installations, which I have exhibited in many exhibitions in Israel and worldwide. Even as a knowledge management consultant at ROM, I specialize in writing and in gamification for organizations. Creation is my essence. I think that creation is the human essence. Are we on the way to giving up on this?
No doubt, the future has already been here for a long time. The AI world is developing at an insane pace, and dozens of innovations pop up every week. Want to write a book? Make a movie? Compose a song? Paint a picture? You no longer need to invest years in learning, training, putting in your soul and talent, spreading paint, and waiting for it to dry. A few keystrokes, and there it is in front of you. Synthetic indeed, a bit kitsch sometimes, with various errors still, but it's improving at a crazy pace, and it's immediate, truly “out of thin air”. Well, not exactly... the machine was trained on human creation; it used up all the sweat and tears of creators to provide this magic.
In a completely unfashionable delay, regulation is beginning to try to cope with this dizzying revolution and regulate the complex relationship between creators and Artificial Intelligence. Microsoft's proposal to pay HarperCollins Publishers for each of the titles that will be used to train the Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT is an example of this need finally permeating.
In my article “On writing,” I gave writing tips to humane human writers. True, it was written before ChatGPT stormed into our lives, and yet creation is an essential part of the human spirit. Read the tips!! Write!! Despite Artificial Intelligence, we will not stop writing and making art, but yes, we will do it a little differently.
Why Doesn't it Do Dishes and Laundry?
One of the most identifying statements about the tension between Artificial Intelligence and human creation was published by writer and cultural activist Joanna Maciejewska in a post on X (formerly twitter). In free paraphrase, it goes like this: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
Except that AI doesn't do dishes and laundry, and it doesn't seem particularly interested in doing so. I don't have a good answer as to why not actually – by all means, give us some excellent household robot assistants! But until then, it will continue to improve in areas of human creativity. The fear of machine domination is not new. Literature and cinema have dealt with it in many magnificent works (usually apocalyptic) decades before anyone first conceived the combination "GPT."
To be perfectly honest, on a scale with enthusiasm for AI at one end and fear from it at the other, I am, to put it delicately, not a great fan. The intersection between human creation and Artificial Intelligence evokes mixed feelings in me, as in many others. There's no doubt that the possibilities opening are nothing short of amazing and exciting, but on the other hand, AI that never stops naturally raises concerns as well. I am trying to move toward the middle of the scale: to use it thoughtfully and with critical thinking. But that's always a good thing, isn't it?
Artificial Intelligence and Human Creation - A Love-Hate Story
So, out of this love-hate relationship I have with AI, I attended the excellent conference "All Intelligence 6" (in Hebrew- Hakol Mebina 6). Among the speakers was a brain scientist who demonstrated that fearing Artificial Intelligence is real, and the director of the AI program at the Israeli Innovation Authority, who gave predictions ranging from utopian to dystopian. But the main focus of the conference was on creators.
It was inspiring to see how creators use Artificial Intelligence to improve their unique expression. All the lectures were fascinating and thought-provoking, but two especially caught my attention: Yaki Gani, who, among his many pursuits, is a member of the successful rock band Rockfour, "brought to the stage" and essentially "conjured up" several members of the 27 Club (a group of leading artists who passed away at age 27, including Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse). In the video he produced, using deep fake, the artists, who are completely dead, performed a cover with him. It was moving and no less chilling to see Kurt Cobain and other legendary artists looking (almost) completely alive and collaborating in a new and captivating performance.
Moran Saar Bechar also used Artificial Intelligence to recreate something that was lost in the past. Her wonderful grandmother, who immigrated from Iraq to Israel in the early years of the state, has no pictures from her childhood in Baghdad. With a detailed description of her grandmother's childhood home, the creative Artificial Intelligence created images that simulated that lost childhood home in Baghdad. The success was partial - some of the images looked authentic to her grandmother, and some much less so. I was moved to tears in any case. I also had a wonderful Iraqi grandmother who boarded a plane in the 1950s to come to Israel. She, too, was forced to leave everything behind: a whole life with a magnificent culture, her childhood home that, from descriptions, sounded like a palace straight out of One Thousand and One Nights folktales, and even the few photographs that documented those lives. When I watched the images created by Artificial Intelligence, the longing for my grandmother and everything she left behind overwhelmed me. I was amazed. Something happened that I didn't expect: Artificial Intelligence evoked a completely real emotion in me.
In my article "On Artificial Intelligence and human gamification", I offer some tips on using creative Artificial Intelligence in gamification solutions. Let's allow creative Artificial Intelligence to sharpen, improve, and assist in our creations but not create them instead of us. I don't know about you, but I don't particularly like doing dishes and laundry 😊.
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