AI: Devil and Deep Blue Sea
December 17, 2024
Remember Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat a Grandmaster at chess? Sometimes seen as the moment Artificial Intelligence entered the public consciousness?
These days, it is front and centre in both the tech and the creative industries. Uniquely, you can find protagonists in both who regard it as humankind’s next great step, and those who think it is the devil incarnate. And plenty who think it may be both; truly the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
AI, and, in particular, GenAI, are off-the-scale impressive in their abilities to ‘just do and deliver’ immense amounts of near-human creativity at the push of a button (actually, at the narration of some reasonably detailed instructions). Just look at the Sora demos to see worlds created that, if actually made, would cost tens of thousands of hours and tens of millions of dollars and even if made with CGI would take hundreds of hours and cost tens of thousands.
But, if someone hadn’t done them before, then AI couldn’t do them either. AI has to have seen and ingested a (close) version of everything it regurgitates – it doesn’t ‘create’ anything. Its superpower is to interpret the users ‘ask’ accurately and render the answer by deploying mega-powerful pattern recognition across the vast landscape of creativity it has scraped (learned is the more polite term).
Obviously, this is a very process and storage hungry enterprise, and that’s why it is an alarmingly huge energy consumer. Sure, it is greener to ‘AI up’ the set of a nineteenth century wild west town, than to ship it and build it. But a million-birthday card rhymes a day, or ten million teenage essays? Not worth the candle, let alone a power station, and of very questionable benefit to anyone.
The tech industry and the creative industries are always symbiotic bedfellows. Where would twentieth century creativity have been without the invention of cinema and television? But no one turns on the TV to watch the device. Now AI adds a new layer of complication and, potentially, real conflict. The tech industry thinks AI will benefit creatives, adding speed and plurality into its mysterious and arcane processes. Creatives think tech just wants to steal its material and profit from repurposing and curating it. Those in the news business say they know how that song goes.
Now governments – specifically today the UK government with its consultation – have to try and hold the ring and do what they think is best for their economy. They are desperate to be seen as an AI friendly environment but, at the same time, have a vibrant creative sector to protect. Their putative answer is to make AI much more transparent so copyright holders can identify use and demand payment. Tech companies and transparency, good luck with that!
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