For all of its current limitations, AI and computer-generated images or texts could make a huge part of today’s creative industry obsolete in the n ear future – if you use artificial image generation tools like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to put together illustrations (think of editorial illustrations, childrens’ books, book covers), and let language models like Chat GPT write your texts (think of essays, articles, novels), you don’t need artists or writers anymore. Or do you? This is not just a dystopian fantasy, it’s happening all over the web and in the real world right now.
The publisher Tor Books recently had to admit they had been using an AI image generator for the cover art of one of their books. There is even a childrens’ book that has been created entirely through the new technology: it was written using Chat GPT, and the illustrations were generated with Mid Journey, an AI image generator. You just need to take a look at it to see that right now, it can not really replace human writers and illustrators, but give the technology a few years at this might look very different.
The internet is also already being flooded with texts generated through Chat GPT (with no-one really fact-checking them), I’ve heard from from a freelance writer who has been contacted by their client: the writer’s services wouldn’t be needed anymore for writing entire texts, but the client offered them to edit text generated by AI (to make it sound more human), for a much lower fee. Buzzfeed recently announced they will use AI for content creation, and their stock went up 200%. They will also cut their workforce by 12%. There are schools which have already banned Chat GPT, because students (of course) will use the technology to write essays for them – with no consideration for, let’s say, historical facts. The text generator also likes to “balance out” more controversial topics, in the sense of false balance: for example it will give arguments why colonial racism or the Holocaust might not have been entirely negative. I hope you can see why this is a very scary development.
From a more poetic and existential perspective, right from the heart of an artist, the musician Nick Cave has commented on what he thinks about Chat GTP writing song lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. (If you’re not familiar with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, or any of his other work, definitely give it a listen.)
And soon, the internet might become unusable through tools like this: Even now, the internet is already flooded with bullshit texts that sound like they’ve been through a translation engine a few dozen times. Maybe you’ve already noticed that searching for high quality information on the internet has already become almost impossible – the search results are filled with scammy sites that are just generated and optimized for search engine results, mainly to squeeze a bit of ad money out of them. When I search for things like “What’s the difference between Mac and Windows computers” or “What are foods with a lot of iron” (or even “How to care for your hamster”) I either get a spammy bot-generated site with nonsense text, or a video that has been created by someone who reads those spammy texts out loud. This will only get worse with tools like Chat GPT, but hey, at least we’ll get AI-generated art next to it to brighten up the text! And it’s already happening: There are questions on Quora (a platform for getting answers to questions posted by its users) that are flooded with copy & paste answers by Chat GPT. In this case, it was not as bad, because the questions were also generated by Chat GPT!
You can often distinguish AI writing from human writing through its tendency to provide very long, non-committal answers, a bit like writing when its optimized for search engines (which makes sense if the language models sources a lot of its texts from the internet).
Of course you need to make sure that you precious AI language model itself isn’t trained on those stylistically questionable robot-written texts, but only on human texts – so there will likely be a watermark to make sure of that. I’m sure there will be similar watermarks in AI-generated images. And this will also be the business model behind Chat GPT – imagine how you can sell this stuff to schools, or newspapers, because they depend on detecting AI-generated texts. By the way, Microsoft has already planned to make AI text creation a part of MS Word.