AI is Destroying Our World, Part 1: Art, Music, and Writing
Artificial Intelligence is ruining what it means to be human. It is destroying the appreciation of the ability to create art from scratch, it is destroying what it means to work out problems by hand with another human being, and it is destroying our ability and appreciation of free thought. Further, it has made many people like that the computers are in charge of us rather than us being in charge of the computers.
I saw a nice cartoon once of someone that a person had made. I told them, "That looks great! What animation software did you use?" They then responded, "It's called ChatGPT. It makes all kinds of characters." I then, not knowing what it was, said, "I'll have to check it out!" To my sadness, when I really found out what it was, that all you have to do is type in, "blonde woman with a ponytail and wearing a business suit in a library," and the AI of ChatGPT will make the art for you, I wanted to cry. This type of system is what will put artists, musicians, and all kinds of people who do things by hand, out of a job, and I am now afraid that these practices and skills will fade into obscurity and people will be all for it.
WALL-E has already come true, people. It has come true in many aspects. ChatGPT requires much less skill even than GoAnimate or Plotagon, where you at least type the story out by hand, build the story from different scenes available, and build what your characters look like by hand. It also is much easier than creating art and T-shirts on Canva, as well as building your own videos on Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. What is this world coming to?
You can now have AI type up your college research
papers and essays, your business reports and presentations, or you can
have AI write your debut novel for you rather than you write down your
heart-driven story by hand or on Microsoft Word. I have also heard that
AI can now write songs for you. If you just type in "country breakup
song" or "song about the mountains, original" it will come up with an
already-recorded-with-vocals-and-band song in minutes, all original, and
all mixed and mastered for you. The person who broke to me this
terrible news said that "this way they don't have to worry about
copyright and paying a songwriter." Songwriting is part of my dream, and the
fact that society would be trying to not pay me and would rather have the computer
churn out a "song" is heartless and makes me angry, not just because the
money isn't coming to me, but even more so because generating quickly, easily and robotically
is more highly prioritized than a person's raw, creative spirit and
skill to contribute to whatever project. If you type in "painting of a
beach with birds" AI can generate that for you as well. It is sickening.
Add to the fact that there's a reason why artists charge multiple
hundreds of dollars for our paintings because of the work that goes into
them, and people don't want to pay that much money for an illustrator.
The AI "paintings" look just as good, and I am disgusted.
We need to go back to the 2000s. Desperately.
I recall being in Lowe's once as a child with my parents in the early 2000s. I was in elementary school and my sister was just a toddler. I'm not sure what my parents were looking at, as Lowe's when you are a little girl is tiring and boring. But we ended up in the carpet section. There was an ad on the wall advertising a brand of carpet, and it was a picture of two women sitting on the carpet floor, smiling together, enjoying a cup of coffee together, and playing their acoustic guitars on a dark evening. Life seemed to be very comforting and simple in that picture. They looked like they were in a cozy, warm winter basement with that carpet, with couches, a fireplace, end tables and lamps surrounding them as they played. They were making their music by hand, heartfelt, and with skill.
AI cannot recreate the sound of a bare finger plucking away soothing notes on a guitar, and the resonance it makes when it fills the family room walls and the vibrations that feel good in your arms as you play. Neither can it reproduce the feeling of satisfaction you get knowing that it is raw, created-by-you music, either. Makes me think of the lady with the hat that played the dulcimer at Explore Park, the living history museum, who said, "Back then, people had to make their own music." We have too much help, people. Something is wrong when people would rather turn to robots and order them to make premade office "music," and the real, scratch made music goes under the rug. You can hear a difference between AI and real music when you listen to it in the car or with headphones, I'm sure too. The AI art, while it looks good, still lacks the look of brushstrokes that suggest it took time, thought, and the hard work of envisioning what the proportions of the painting are. While it looks right, something just isn't right about it at the same time.
With an essay or writing, I can definitely tell who or what it was written by. It is not written in a scholarly manner, rather, it is written rather Spartan and robotic-like, because that is what and who it was written by. Robots don't have a brain to research and provide facts and opinions. They only have the capacity to do what they are told. Amazon has a section now that sums up the reviews for a product using AI: "Customers say they generally like the item. However, they also say..." I think this is completely inaccurate, and is a computer-generated addition of all the reviews. I still believe in deciding for yourself which product is the best for you.
If we keep desiring AI more and more, then art, music and writing by hand will become a lost art. It will become to us as obscure of a thing to do as Pa playing the fiddle and Ma Ingalls sewing in the living room in Little House on the Prairie. I mean, it's hard work to sit down and learn how to play a song on the guitar! You have to remember where all the notes are on the staff, you have to practice, it's a lot more work and takes much longer than 2-day Amazon shipping to learn! It takes more patience than just telling the computer to create a song for you, and telling your Amazon Echo to play it in your living room! Can't we just sit back and have the machine make the music for us?
No!
It's the simpler things in life, my friend. Very fun, and done for entertainment. Yes, it's not always easy, and it does take "work" to sound good and make good art. But it is the most satisfying thing in the world and brings so much joy. The ability to create by hand adds to the fullness of life and if society replaces it with AI, then they are left dull.
Do you think the same thing? Let me know in the comments below.
Ciao,
The Quiet Girl
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