If AI is coming for our creative livelihoods, how do we respond?
We all need a strategy when the stakes are this high
Recently, my 15-year-old daughter wanted to find a good sci-fi/action movie for us to watch. She’s a movie buff and has seen a lot of contemporary films already, so I ended up suggesting I Robot, thinking we were settling back for a couple of hours of escapist thriller action, not realising it would result in a family debate about AI and how close the concepts of the story might be to real life. Based on a 1950 book by Isaac Asimov, I Robot is set in 2035, in a world where robots have been developed to assist humanity and are now commonplace in daily life. As technology has advanced, these robots have been hardwired with three essential laws to ensure they live in harmony with humans:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In the movie, thanks to these laws, most people don’t believe robots will ever cause harm to humans. Will Smith’s character, a swaggering cop called Spooner, begs to differ because he was involved in an accident where a robot had to make a moral choice and, in his opinion, it failed because it was incapable of making the right one. The film is about what happens at the tipping point of this kind of technology, when AI makes a leap towards sentience and, by extension, world domination. It looks like a popcorn movie, but the disconcerting and now all-too-real layers of Asimov’s classic are there in the way the robot dreams of the future, and the story’s ambiguous ending.
Also this week, HarperCollins announced that it would be partnering with audio AI company Eleven Labs to create audiobooks for its foreign language business. This agreement, reported in the Bookseller, will lead to the ‘production of select deep backlist series books that would not otherwise have been created’. In other words: no need to panic, authors and audio narrators – because this is translations, not original language, and this is only happening to ‘deep’ backlist books (whatever ‘deep’ means?) … not your books.
Not yet.
Of course, this development was presented in the article as unerringly positive. ‘Now every author can see their work come to life in audio, readers can be offered more choice, and the linguistic barriers of content can be dissolved,’ said Eleven Labs Chief Engineer Mati Staniszewski. However, when an article does not discuss the pros and cons of any such developments, we can be pretty confident we are being sold an idea, not asked to consider one. This exciting, practical and positive portrayal of events is the first step to normalising new practices around the way we use AI to produce our creative content. It made me think of those people in I Robot, walking around unaware of the growing threat – which, for them, resulted in thousands of angry, red-tinged robots jumping out of trucks and marching them off to curfew, at which point they all rebelled. But the threat had to literally stare them in the face before they realised the danger enough to respond.
AI is not an easy topic because it is multi-faceted. Change and progress are inevitable, and we’re all likely to end up using AI in many different ways in our daily lives - sometimes consciously, at other times completely unaware of it. (A little co-pilot sign just came out of nowhere and offered to edit this sentence for me… the irony!) We know that humans have benefitted inestimably from our ability to create machines that assist us in our daily lives, even though every new technology arrives coupled with a threat to the value of human productivity. Nevertheless, AI is a powerful tool, capable of things we cannot fully grasp as yet – and it will only continue to grow in its sophistication, as it replicates our problem-solving abilities faster, more efficiently and less emotionally. If it begins to produce comparable offerings of plays, novels, poetry, music, audio performances, etc., where does this leave us?
We have thrived as a species because of our unprecedented ability to work together – but this is predicated on our capacity to understand and empathise with one another, and to express the beauty, joy and terrors of the world in myriad different creative forms. We are creatures that explore not only the logical and practical aspects of the world, but also connect deeply through intangible forces such as love and spirituality. We have developed our advanced world through our conceptualisation – for better and worse – of things that don’t exist, which we then set about creating. The slow apportioning of human consciousness and connectivity to an Artificial Intelligence that is designed not only to mimic but ultimately to outperform us, can only offer our culture a hollow, insistent echo of everything that makes us our unique selves. And if we follow these developments blindly, it could lead to us all being more disconnected, disillusioned and disempowered than ever before. Therefore, creative industries need to be fully engaged with this topic, learning from those who can provide insight and nuance in order to have essential discussions about what all this means. Let’s not wait until our creativity has been sequestered, and the full implications of AI are jumping out at us, to stare us squarely, unequivocally, in the face.
Here are some ways I’m going to try to be useful in discussions and developments around AI in creative industries, while protecting my own creative works:
Contact my publishers and agent to express my views.
Ask my agent about their contract boilerplate wording in regards to AI, and express my wishes for AI usage to be clarified in future contracts and backdated in older ones – so we can get clarity on how AI can be used around my work.
Contact and support the work of places like the Australian Society of Authors (the Society of Authors in the UK; or in the US, the Authors Guild, National Writers Union and Writers Guild of America), and any organisations looking out for the rights of authors in this context.
Keep up to date with what is going on (Google searches are useful for this) and share news that I find.
Always let readers know if I use AI to generate any of my written work (I won’t!) and expect the same from other creators.
Keep a good sense of humour even when this stuff is hard – it’s one of the things I love most about us humans! Let’s finish on that note, because my daughter sent me this photo from school the day after our movie session, to show me she was ‘putting the work in’ for her project’s SMART goals (shared with her permission):
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So wise. Also, your daughter <3