Artificial what??

Over the past few weeks, I've been observing the life around me and taking notes. I've had many a discussion with Paul and Annette about how much life has changed over the last few decades which hasn't really been for better. 

Different people have different ways of making their opinions known. Some people like to use video platforms like YouTube to voice their opinions. For me, written word is the preferred choice of arsenal. So much so, I'd thought I'd change the focus of this blog to something I can write about to get issues off my chest.

Today, I'm going to talk about something that has been around for a while and seems to be growing stronger by the day. Everywhere you turn, it seems to be governing your life and it's becoming a very concerning trend. I'm talking about Artificial Intelligence (or AI for short).  

In theory, AI sounds like a great idea. The thought of AI making your day-to-day life (such as laundry, housework and doing the dishes) easier while you concentrate on other more pleasurable activities is something most of us have dreamt our whole lives. At least, that's what AI should be about, isn't it? Instead now, the trend has gone the other way and all our pleasurable activities have been governed by AI, leaving us with all the repetitive chores we all dread.

So, what has AI taken over? Well, for starters, the arts. Yes, you heard right. Instead of AI working to do the housework for us like we've dreamt of, it has started to take over the artistic endeavours we've wanted to do ourselves. One example is a digital art competition a few years ago where an artist won first prize for a completely generated AI image much to the chagrin of other artists who used computer softwares to create their own pieces of work. The artist in question argued that he didn't just type in one prompt to get the perfect image. He'd spent hours perfecting his prompts to produce a picture that suited his version. That in itself probably shouldn't have been to much of an issue. What annoyed the other participants was the fact that the image was not of his creation but one of millions of images on the internet picked up by the computer's algorithm to generate the image - an image that (lets be honest) was done by someone else and used in the final creation without the original artist's permission. 

This worrying trend seems to be happening across the board in different areas of the artistic world - music, filmmaking, animation, voice-work and even writing. More and more artists are finding themselves out of work as a result. The most concerning thing about this is the fact that it takes very little time to create these so-called pieces of art. What would usually take an artist or musician weeks or even months (sometimes years) to create their masterpiece takes AI a few minutes to create the same result or something even more spectacular.

I reckon we have become lazier as a result of AI. People seem to have taken AI and used it to create just about anything, leaving almost nothing to the imagination. They seem to forget that artificial intelligence is just that - artificial. There's nothing real about it apart from being really depressing. Already, there has been examples where an AI robot has been able to readjust its way of thinking and solved obstacles presented before them. It's only a matter of time before they completely disregard the command of their programmer and start to do whatever they want. Have we not learnt anything from sci-fi films where self-aware machines take control of mankind??

I, for one, am pleased to say that I do not embrace AI in anyway. We are a family of artists and we like to keep our creativity as organic as possible. It has no place in our household.