Rebecca Ackermann
Could a bot write this intro? The hype around artificial intelligence has pushed this question to the center of public discourse. Conversational bots and automated image generators are popping up everywhere.
Despite a few optimistic case studies of their potential, the current models are limited and the results they produce deeply flawed. But it doesn’t seem to matter that the tech behind AI is not ready for prime time. The models only have to tell a convincing story to the humans signing the checks — and they are.
Headlines and institutions alike are declaring AI the future of work, poised in particular to replace writers and artists. That these breathless predictions are outpacing the quality of the tech itself says a lot about our cultural moment — and our long-festering trend of devaluing creative work.
The supposed promise of the AI future is efficient and abundant content. Creative agencies are using image generators to mock up client concepts. Even literary magazines have reported being bombarded with AI-generated submissions, and yes, editors are hitting publish.
But the AI models have proved time and again that they perpetuate biases, misunderstand cultural context and prioritize being convincing over telling the truth. They draw on data sets of creative work by humans, an approach that might otherwise be labeled plagiarism or data-mining.
Today, these models require humans (with their own biases) to train them toward “good” results and then check their work at the end. Because the tools are built for pattern-matching, their results are often repetitive and thin, an aesthetic of similitude rather than invention.
The impetus to replace human workers, then, doesn’t come from slam-dunk capacities of the tech. It stems from years of companies — especially those in publishing, tech, and media — turning the screws on creative work to spend ever less on workers.
Pay for writers, editors, and illustrators in this country has stagnated over the past two decades. In the U.S., public funding for the arts is embarrassingly low compared with other wealthy Western nations. Many artists need to migrate from one social media app to another to build an audience for their work and eke out an income.
How much lower can art’s value go? Why pay creative workers living wages when you can program machines to churn out interchangeable content units?
Well, because these models are no substitute for human creative labor. If we want to break out of repetitive molds, strive to unravel biases and build new possibilities, the work must come from humans.
The danger in reducing creative work to widgets for outsourcing is that we lose the steps of reflection and iteration that produce new connections.
The human brain has a unique capacity for recursive processing that allows us to interpret ideas beyond a set of rules. Each step of the creative process — no matter how slow, small, or boring — is an expansive act, transporting a concept into a new place and imagining a wider world than what exists today.
An AI takeover is not inevitable, despite what business and tech leaders say. This is not the first tech hype cycle, and some regulators, unions, and artists are already pushing back.
The Writers Guild of America has proposed protections and regulatory standards around the use of AI in script-writing. SAG-AFTRA, the screen actors and TV and radio workers union, has stated that if studios want to use AI to simulate actor performances, they’ll have to negotiate with the union.
Some researchers are building tools to protect the work of visual artists from being absorbed into models for image generators, and others have launched open-source systems to highlight biases in AI models.
But the broader call to action is a cultural one: to recognize that creative work is not merely a commodity or content, but a necessary and highly skilled practice that deserves robust funding and support.
Creativity is how meaning is constructed in culture. This is a task that can’t be done by machines. A bot may be able to swiftly write an ending to this story, but we have to ask ourselves: Whose voices do we actually need?
Rebecca Ackermann has written about tech and culture for MIT Technology Review, Slate and elsewhere. Previously, she worked as a designer at tech companies such as Google and NerdWallet.
