Fun & fear of AI
Yes, I have a colleague who wrote a song and asked AI to create the music. He gave a few instructions, followed by a few requests for changes, and then a change of music key, and then a change of tempo, and etc. The result was excellent, but he had not composed anything! He doesn’t play piano, nor any other instrument on his resulting sound track.
I’m not sure that this makes him a talented musician.
Making so many music videos at “warp speed” using AI – is so very scary, he will flood away, by mass competition, any genuine artistic skill in music. Yes, the AI results get better, which is why it becomes more problematic.
It is happening in many other areas . as well
For example YouTube is full of speeches made by a “talking head” of some famous person, but that person is not speaking, it is just a photograph of the person animated by AI , the voice is taken by AI and used to “speak” another speech. The ultimate “fake news” performance.
it is too easy to become excited about the AI technology, and to ignore the consequences. It is too late to stop it, but we have to at least think how this will impact true artistic talent, the hard work of learning and perfecting, the ability to find and keep work, and the joy and pleasure of all of us to see / hear /appreciate real human efforts and results.
For those who are uniquely “consumers” , those who do not create, there is no immediate problem. But with AI – generated stuff becoming predominant, there will be less and less encouragement for anyone to learn how to genuinely create anything. And even if the passion is there, there will be no market for such skills, and so no way to pay the bills.
We will also never know what is real and what not, what is true and what is fake.
Each generation faces skill obsolescence from the generation before , but with AI we enter, for the first time in human history, such a mass paradigm shift for so much of humanity.
And this is not to speak about all the other risks of an unfettered AI “taking over”, controlled by a small group of billionaires, political extremists, etc.
So, we can “have fun” with AI right now , but it is clear that soon we will have a situation which becomes no longer fun for everyone.
