I’ve recently been using Grammarly to clean up articles on the blog. It’s AI scans your posts and points out grammar errors (duh) and offers suggestions to improve wording. I just have the free version, so I only get a few suggestions. Though it will still highlight problem areas, making them stand out easier for me to fix them. I would have killed to have this kind of technology back when I was writing a ton of essays in university. It’s just unfortunate the paid tiers are so expensive.
It got me thinking about AI though, and what it means for arts and entertainment. Artists are, of course, up in arms about it. There’s plenty of brigading on X targeting artists accused of passing off AI artwork as their own. Even though a lot of that art was indeed hand made, and the artists have the receipts. It’s a witch hunt, and to be honest, I can’t blame them for reacting this way. If AI art is starting to become indistinguishable from digital art made by a real person, that threatens to put a lot of artists out of a job.
It’s even started impacting the games industry. Elon Musk recently announced a new studio that would be using AI technology to make video games. They showed off an in-engine demo of a FPS game. It was rudimentary, but it was playable. There are a lot of people in my loose sphere who seem to think this is a wonderful idea. A lot of that comes from a visceral hatred of Western game developers. People who have done everything they can to “deconstruct” the hobby. Something I’ve already talked at length over.
The problem is that many conservatives don’t understand the value of the artistry that goes into making games, or anything creative. Somebody wrote the Bible. Whether that be God or some dude out in the desert, it doesn’t matter. You won’t get many Christians arguing that it’s not a work of art, or that it wasn’t created with soul.
Computers don’t have souls. All AI does is remix existing works based on massive databases of human creativity. Us humans meanwhile are the only species known to intentionally create art. We can train an elephant to paint, or a chicken play the piano, but these animals aren’t consciously engaged in the creative process. They’re just mimicking what we’ve taught them. A hen can peck at lights on a keyboard to make some loose approximation of Stars and Stripes Forever, but she’s never going to create a wholly original work. Nor will she have an emotional appreciation for the works of Sousa. AI is no different. It can make a close approximation of human passion, but it will never fully replicate it.
I don’t think this is going to stop people charging head first into the field of AI. Big entertainment sees it as their next big meal ticket. Computers can parse through thousands of works, cross reference them with their historic financial performance and current market trends, and theoretically make a sure-fire best seller. If you’re a Hollywood mogul, a guaranteed hit is too tempting to pass up. Though what you’ll end up with is more flat, flavourless mush than what braindead corporations are already putting out. I find it funny that George Orwell warned about this in Nineteen Eighty Four. The author imagined machines creating obscene music and pulp fiction for society’s underclasses. With so much AI slop already on YouTube, we’re not far off from that reality.
AI shouldn’t be completely written off for creatives though. It’s a tool like any other. Much like Grammarly can fill in as a virtual editor for a small blogger like myself, there are lots of ways AI can help other creatives work more effectively. Especially when it comes to passing off tedious tasks that are necessary to the creative process, but slow down the workflow. Or in my case, filling in blindspots to make sure that work is polished.
One point of contention I’ve observed recently is whether it should be used for translation. This is one of those tedious but necessary tasks I mentioned. Especially for Japanese manga, anime, and video games that are popular overseas. A lot of localizers have taken a strong stance against using AI, while fans of foreign works have been championing the idea. The problem here is that those localizers can’t help injecting their politics into the work they’re translating. We saw this in the recent Westernized version of Trails Through Daybreak II, but there are many other cases within and outside of gaming.
With localization, the localizer’s job is to take something written in one language and have it make sense in another. Japanese doesn’t always translate 1:1 into English, so there is a little finessing that needs to be done to make it palatable to audiences on this side of the Pacific. Yet there is no creative process involved here. It’s not their job to take “creative liberties” with the work beyond previously stated. If AI can result in more faithful translations without some charlatan thinking they can “improve” on the original author, then I’m all for it.
What I’m not for is using AI to replace the original author.
