How excited is everyone to read another thing about AI. If you said super excited than I have a treat for you.
What is AI? Depends on who you ask. Some people think it’s Skynet and will be the downfall of the human race and others think of it like a toaster, it’s just gonna help us do the thing better.
Well, from a media and creative viewpoint it’s both. Technology should help us do the thing better. Make it more efficient, to overall give us more time to make the thing. But there’s an issue right now with AI and the creative community. The way it’s being presented is that it will take our jobs and it actually has, even though it’s waaaaay far away from being a viable replacement. Large companies are laying folks off in droves to make sure the stockholders are continuing to see similar returns as they did during the pandemic. And they are waiting to hire in hopes this tech will cut out the middle people, the directors, copywriters, editors and producers that make the creative process work. The hopes of the companies is to make extreme profits and to make the impossible happen, have creativity be a quantifiable process.
Two things won’t make this a reality.
One, the wealth transfer during the pandemic was one of the largest in human history and made the filthy rich disgustingly more wealthy. And happened because we didn’t have a choice, we were trapped inside and forced to get shots, show paperwork, sign manifestos just to work in California. So no one noticed corporations like Apple, Amazon , etc getting the lions share of money while central banks pumped out trillions to keep the economy going. It’s safe to say that that tested a lot of folks and we defiantly lost a lot of say in what government/corporations are capable of doing to its populations. About 200 million more people fell into poverty because of the pandemic and I could go on but don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer, but anyone with a brain that’s not foggy should go back and do a little research. Anyway, there’s no way to recapture those kinds of gains without a similar global crisis. And Two, the people being laid off cannot afford the shiny toys that made that wealth transfer happen in the first place. You see when people can’t afford to subscribe to the thing or buy the thing because they were laid off then the companies selling the thing cannot make money off it. Tech and media have lost close to 1.5 million jobs since 2023, who do you think is cancelling their Netflix subs? The way AI is helping hold up the stocks and investment looks like NFT’s or crypto, the value is all in the R&D, hype and fomo.
From what I can see AI is just a giant bank of remixes of others work and not a very good one at that. IP is still the thing that creatives create that has value. Making AI do only creative things may be on the top of the list for someone making these tools but the rest of us would like to see AI actually do something that we cannot do, maybe clean all the plastic from the oceans, figure out strains of wheat that can survive extreme heat, invent a material that we can paint on roads to help reflect heat and reverse climate change? Those all feel more important for a machine smarter than us to do right? Or I guess it could make us Smurfs 5 and a few dozen more Mavel movies.
I know I know, reality gets in the way of the dream. But this is more a nightmare. Not because I think it will destroy the planet but because the people making it don’t care about intellectual property, human genius, creativity or any of the things that are worth celebrating about us as beings. I have said that one of the greatest things about people is our ability to tell stories, to connect to one another and to create. If we have a purpose it is not to do mindless chores for money but to make our short lives bearable and to celebrate what makes us laugh and smile and cry and be.
I live in the belly of the beast, San Francisco and here is why it won’t work out well for the people who are making AI try to be creatives.
Clients. It’s obvious the programmers have never had clients. Clients, for all us seasoned creatives, are not the most focused, knowing or visual bunch and they need our experience and skill to deliver their mediocre vision. Try having AI figure out that they want something big but small, old but new and for it to be brought in under budget with three weeks of reviews passed deadline and 65 notes per day. Good luck with that.
Pivoting off clients, you know who wasn’t laid off the last two years. Upper Management. You know why creative is always the first to get axed? Because what we do isn’t quantifiable. And upper management needs to be able to fire people. It’s how empty suits stay in power. Blame creative. Blame someone. Not to mention that there’s a human aspect to the power dynamic, the people in these positions are not always well adjusted or rational, they are more often than not, assholes. That’s why they love power. You think they will be able to blame a computer program and keep their jobs? Or get that corner office? Heck no. They need us to blame, they need us to fire and they need us to actually make the thing when all is said and done.
What makes me able to say these things, why the attitude?
I was hired to help train the language models a few months ago. And for an ok hourly rate I was tasked to slowly make myself obsolete. It’s safe to say that these models are decades from being able to do what I and the many more talented folks out there do. They are being trained on colligate level English, which is not how people speak, think or behave and it is horrible for visual communication. I breathed a sigh of relief when I started to plug in information. Basically until AI has eyes it won’t be able to make things anywhere near our level. Certainly not if someone in government or in companies gets smart and starts protecting copyright and IP. There’s that and human culture is fluid and not programmable. It won’t be able to speak in slang or get ideas that aren’t readily spelled out. Our minds don’t work like this, not in creative fields anyway. Overall working in the language models really was a great way to see how far these technologies have to go. It may not help get my friends hired but it certainly won’t be doing what we do anytime soon. Just don’t tell the investors or Disney that.
Revenge of the nerds, now I don’t say this to be cruel but doesn’t it strike you that the computer scientists are not building AI to program or code? That they are not building models to streamline healthcare or to do paralegal work 100 times faster so people don’t have to rot in jail? That they are not building the models to do the things we actually need says volumes about the overall attitude of the companies developing it. They are over educated, classist, and don’t want to take jobs from their wives, brothers or fellow Stanford grads, but tanking an entire industry like Hollywood is ok. And I’ll blame the CEO’s in Hollywood and Silicon Vally too. They are running their industries like GM or Ford in the 1970’s and they are doing a great jobs at turning SF and LA into Detroit. The effects of the layoffs, strikes, pandemic and this technology kicked our cities in the dick so hard it’ll take decades to recover. But there is hope, AB2930 will help curb some of the more passive horror AI could throw at us in California and New York is already not allowing it to sort and data mine our resumes or block a hire because it doesn’t understand what a producer does.
And the last thing is that right now, AI is only as good as what it can steal and the operator using it. So if you are a talentless ding dong you may be able to make a nightmarish blob monster look kind of cool but if it took you longer to render that garbage than it did for you to learn to draw or go outside and take a picture you’re doing life wrong. And that’s the thing AI and these people trying to push it really need to get, a life.