Amid all the talk about AI and whether it will take over the world, and become sentient, and kill all of us, or whatever, I end up thinking about three different things.
- How much of what we see around us is something like ‘artificial intelligence’ already? For example, there’s a lot of computing thought in a car. Backup cameras with all those lines to show where you are safe are a bit of AI. Siri and Alexa are pretty stupid in my opinion (derived from the answers my students used to bring to class — But I asked Alexa! Well, she’s wrong) but they are still doing things that people are surprised that they can do. Some people anyway…
- How is this sentient AI going to keep getting power? From what I’ve read, AI takes enormous amounts of power, and some companies who are giving away free trials are losing money hand over fist on each subscriber. (Google “losing money on AI” and you get articles from the Washington Post among others, that Microsoft, Google and Open AI are in trouble.) I think the blue screen of death is more or less in the past, but mysterious power outages that cause trouble are not. Tree down in this area? No power. So the real giveaway that AI is sentient and up to trouble, will show when the AI starts figuring out its own power source. And even then, I’m thinking it will need *stuff* to keep going. Will it go down in the mines or order up a new drill rig? Will people drill for it if they hear that there is trouble? I NEVER hear people worrying about this aspect of the question.
- What about all the art that is being created with AI? There are a lot of different art generators. Here’s one. https://hotpot.ai/art-generator You can make ten different pictures a day for free, and download them to your computer. You cannot use them in any way without paying a fee, which is why I’m not giving you examples of anything I tried. But the site is a good example of what can be done.
You give HotpotAI words. It gives you pictures. You can choose the style of the pictures from a large menu (comic or classic or hotpot style 3, etc) and get examples of the different styles for the same words. You can get above ten pictures pretty quickly and the temptation to pay can get interesting.
This post was inspired in part by this pretty picture and the post it points to.
The blog post contains a really beautiful set of images done by an artist who has experimented extensively with art generators. I love scrolling through it. People who have tried art generators point out that there is a lot of “artistry” in getting the picture you want by giving the correct prompt. This particular blogger has gotten really good at that and I love looking at her images, both here and in other posts.
But it does bring up an ugly point about AI and one that is hotly contested.
Is AI stealing other people’s work? Since Kate Greenaway is dead she’s not losing much, but you can see that AI can do an amazing imitation. For a living artist, that’s a real problem. The particular blogger that I’m pointing at is positive that there’s no issue. Others are positive that the courts are going to agree with her. One blogger maintained that there’s always been fraud in art, though I’m not sure that’s a winning argument.
I think there’s an issue, no matter what the courts say. I’m just not sure how to draw lines around it.
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