AI didn’t write this post, but you can’t really know that for sure. That’s the sad thing. I could’ve just asked ChatGPT to write a post that sounds like this, about this topic, and then maybe tweak a bit to add in my own language.
I didn’t, but you don’t know. Pandora’s box has once again been opened. And I am both fascinated by it and disturbed by it. I’ve used it various times to try it out and I’ve gotten really excellent results. Nothing that I’ve published, but once again: you don’t know.
I’m not sure we will ever know again. Are they going to have some way to tag everything AI-generated, some snippet of mandatory code, that will allow us to know? And if they do, and we see it, what does it change?
I worry about the creative people of the world, people who write and draw and paint and create in ways that can be done digitally. If AI bests us, how do we fit in? I don’t write professionally. My income doesn’t rely on my creative work. I have less to lose than a writer or an artist whose income relies on their work. If more choose AI, because it’s free, then it’s going to be a lot harder to make an income in the digital world.
If students can generate essays in seconds, using AI, then what is now the value of an essay in education? What do we do about that? What happens to the human brain if creativity declines?
The box has been opened and I see no way it could ever be shut. To some degree, this means we have to practice acceptance, while still trying to find ways to move forward and preserve our creative minds. Perhaps there will be an increase in verbal (or signed, for those of us who are Deaf signers) presentations instead of essays. We can still write our stories, our books, our poems, our everything. Somehow there has to be that method of identifying a creative work that came from a person, not a machine. Not to suppress the AI-generated work, but to highlight the creativity of human minds.
I find it difficult to predict where it all leads. I’ll still keep writing. I’ll still draw. I have my imperfect practice, which will stay imperfect even as AI works perfect themselves. Perhaps it is in the imperfections that we come to recognize the humanity in the work. That’s not currently the case, as AI works are still imperfect, enough that we could confuse them for our own. Eventually this will probably not be the case.
What will it take to protect the collective creative spirit of our humankind?
