Artless 8 - Intelligence, Identity, Insecurity 2nd January 2025

Opinion

Intelligence, Identity, Insecurity

There was a short fantasy film some time ago on YouTube called Ahalya. I won't spoil it for you, but I am reminded of the feeling of being stuck inside my own body, unable to communicate that I am a human being.

I am writing this to you at 8:34 in the morning as certain worries tumble around in the back of my head and noise fills my soundscape and my body hungers for bread and butter. I am a human being expressing my humanity through the words that you are reading. I feel confident that when you read this, you will come to the conclusion that a human being like you has written what you are reading.

But text can now be machine-generated. It can be churned out in reasonably good quality and in large amounts. You can't know if I wrote what you are reading. I can no longer be confident that you will know that what you are reading was written by a human being like yourself -- that it was written by me.

Video can now be machine-generated. Realistic footage of me talking to a camera in my voice can now be generated with ease and speed. You can't know if it is a human being you are looking at on your screen. You can't be sure that it is I who is speaking to you about something that can happen to any human being.

Audio can now be machine-generated. Extended podcasts can now be made that sound exactly like me, fumbles and all, talking about matters I usually talk about or even things I never touch. You can no longer be sure if what you are listening to is the voice of a fellow human being saying what they feel and think. I can no longer expect you to know that it is I who is speaking to you in my podcasts and audio posts.

In a world where everything I used to do to let you know that I am human can now be AI-generated, how do I show you that I am a human being. How do I have my humanity acknowledged? How do I protect myself from being stolen?

We already live in a world where people's humanity doesn't get acknowledged and where they are treated as if they are not human. Their suffering is made light of and their pain gets laughed at. Treating humans as if they are not human is not a problem AI created, but it's certainly going to make it worse.

Our tribal past is our tribal present. Once upon a time, the otherness of those outside our tribes was asserted using religious symbology. The others, we were told, are not humans like us. They are to be fought and killed. Our gods dictate that we do not kill, but it is okay to kill them because they are not like us. See how they look? See how they speak that strange language? See how they eat odd foods? Do not speak to them. Do not read what they have written. Do not eat with them or marry them. They are not people. They exist only so they may be enslaved, subjugated, and / or destroyed.

This is who we are. This is who we have always been. This is not new. This is as old as we are, as old as "civilisation" is.

The greatest hurdle in the way of people coming together is people not being able to hear each other. And in the age of generative AI, I fear a great pall of silence will fall over us all even as we complain loudly about the noise.

Like the gentleman from Ahalya, we are walking down a corridor, distracted by what AI looks like, unaware of what it is about to do to us.

Links

AI makes us all the same

An English professor speaks about the importance of different voices and how with AI use, all voices begin to sound the same. What we gain in speed, we lose in uniqueness. Good writing isn't about the rules of grammar. It is about the sentiment behind it and the emotion it evokes in the minds of the humans who read it.

Is AI poetry more human than human?

After a study found AI-written poetry was rated more favourably by readers, Jen Benka wrote about art in the age of ChatGPT. She writes, "In racing to confer god-like status to machine output, what’s lost is what makes a poem a poem: a necessary urge to plumb what it means to have “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver wrote. Poems are meditations on the experience of being, explicitly created from breath and blood by deep listening, an acute attention to subject and language, and an embrace of discovery." I am personally more of a prose reader, but to the extent that this applies to art, I wholeheartedly agree. We have never had to describe art as a human discipline. There was no need to. Now there is and we should do it at every opportunity.

AI writing is improving, but it still can’t match human creativity

According to a recent study: "Humans outscored AIs by about 80% in poetry, 100% in novels, and 150% in speeches, the researchers report in a preprint posted on OpenReview and currently under peer review." Ximing Lu, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, said: “They copy, paste, chop, and put together pieces from existing writing to make something amazing,” she says. “It’s like a DJ remixing existing music. This is definitely valuable, but it’s different from a composer.”

Why this philosopher is not afraid of AI

Johnathan Bi on why, as a philosopher, he no longer worries about whether AI will replace him. He also speaks of how the coming days will see a return to rhetoric instead of writing, and that philosophical writing will become more personality driven than before.

Journalists will build their own AI tools

In Neiman's media predictions for 2025, Retha Hill says journalists will start embracing AI to build tools that help them instead of being scared of AI.

UK artists reject plan to let AI firms use copyrighted material

Notice how in every part of the world, capitulation before AI firms is taking one very specific shape. Everyone who is seeking to violate copyright and feed art into AI is justifying it by saying "if we don't do it, someone else will". The need for global oversight is urgent.