I didn’t always hate AI. As a boy in the 1980s, every toy I wanted was a robot, or robot-related; I spent nights on end programming my Commodore Plus 4 to recite the alphabet. But recently, in my day job as a creative writing professor, I’ve found myself so angry about it that I’d happily join an army against the grifters forcing it on us. We cannot allow AI to replace art and the creative process when AI companies have stolen all of our books to “train” the machines. It feels odd even to have to write a sentence like that when, for the majority of people, it goes without saying, but pro-AI propaganda has more money invested in it than anything else on the planet.
The tech industry has made a major PR blunder, though. Instead of presenting AI-generated art as an amusing parlour trick (a robot who can wear a hat and juggle and compose a passable sonnet — how charming!) they chose to overplay their hand and threatened human creatives and researchers with obsolescence. Why, they suggested, would we ever again bother staying up late into the night working on a tricky scene in our screenplay? Or practising our scales so we can one day play in an ensemble? Or having one more go at that acrylic of our beloved cat? The computers can do it! Think of the time we’ll save to do absolutely nothing in because life no longer has any meaning.
