Art and Artificial Intelligence

In this episode I explore the uneasy intersection of art and artificial intelligence. From the cute Ghibli trend to the unsettling ways AI alters bodies, ethics and meaning, this is a reflection on how machines are beginning to shape human creativity. 

What happens when our personal memories, our images, our voices and our artistic fingerprints become raw material for a machine? AI is not just disrupting art, it is quietly colonising human expression by training us to depend on machines for our own creativity.  

Is AI expanding our imagination or slowly replacing our capacity to express? And if art has always been resistance, what happens when we hand the act of creation to algorithms? 

Transcript

Speaker: 0:09

Welcome to the second episode of Fireflies, where I share thoughts that glow after the dark. Tiny sparks that make you think. Hi, this is Anushree.

Speaker: 0:25

A few months ago, my country, India, was hit by this tsunami of AI-generated Ghibli images. It was a fun trend led by ChatGPT from OpenAI, where you could feed your images to artificial intelligence, and within minutes, your image would be converted in this ever-loved Ghibli style. It was everywhere. From WhatsApp display pictures to Instagram to Facebook, everywhere, even LinkedIn. And you know, everyone was using it from journalists, artists, and even world leaders. Everyone was getting gibblified. And honestly, it looked super cute. I mean the images were so beautiful. They had this innocent and pure quality to it. Everyone in the images, they had their face rounded up, their cheeks puffier, and the visuals were dreamlike. Like you are transported into another dimension. It was a beautiful moment. A beautiful cultural moment, if I may say.

Speaker: 1:36

That's a different thing that Studio Ghibli never allowed OpenAI to use its copyrighted and well-recognized drawing style and aesthetic on this mass scale. A drawing style that took decades to develop. Also, there were no controls over the kind of images that were being converted. Images that Miyazake would not even have touched. I mean, I saw the first frame of a famous, rather infamous, leaked sex tape converted into Jibli Style on Twitter, now called as X, with the caption that everyone knows this image. It had some thousand odd likes. I also saw pre-pubescent girls given small breasts in the jubilefied images, whereas the source original image had nothing of that sort. Why AI felt the need to add curves on a 10-year-old child is beyond me. I mean it's very well known that Miyazaki famously never sexualized his female characters in his movies, and he's respected and loved for that. That was the first time the thought of this conjunction of art and artificial intelligence. This mesh of a third entity that is growing and expanding worried me. Really, really worried me.

Speaker: 3:11

We all know technology companies are no saints. Never been. I mean, if a capitalist institution is pushing a trend and is offering something free, that generally means that it they want something from you that they cannot demand directly. It's a fairly common strategy in the technological world and which has been pretty successful also. That if you if you can make something easy to use, fun to use, and free to use, you can get great response from public at large. Just think it this way that you wouldn't have voluntarily given your personal images, images of your children, images of your family, of your home, your office to ChatGPT had it asked it directly from you. Just think, if if ChatGPT would have asked an access to your Google Photos or your images drive, you wouldn't have given it. You wouldn't have given the access to the AI model. But this time around, because you wanted Jupyfied images, you voluntarily shared your personal private information. And this has not happened for the first time, actually. There are many, many case studies around it. But let me just give you a few examples. Facebook and Snapchat, they introduced this fun face filters like you know those dog ears and aging effects. What it did is that it trained the users to voluntarily scan their faces from multiple angles. The data collected was high-quality facial geometry and expression data, which ultimately helped improve facial recognition through AI. I believe a lot of millennials would remember Pokemon Go. What Pokemon Go did was it it encouraged millions of users to share their precise GPS data and share their movement patterns. It helped correct a lot of maps, but the point that I'm trying to make is that gamification has always been one of the favorite go-to strategies for the tech world. And it has been successful also. But but AI, or in this case, LLMs, large language models, they are a different kind of a demon. We just don't know what we are against yet.

Speaker: 6:09

First and foremost, as a human being, when I'm creating any type of art and if I'm using any social media, which is kind of essential now, there's a high there's a very high probability that it would be scraped to train AI models. Then this AI would use some fraction or fragment of my creation, something that took me money and years of hard work to master my natural talent also, and it would create AI art from it. Where are my intellectual property rights? I cannot fight them because how would I prove that the art created by these machines carries a part of my work? How do I prove that this creative smoothie generated by AI carries few drops of my personal essence?

Speaker: 7:05

Also, what if I don't want my art to be remixed for something that I am ethically and morally against? Just think of it. Think of a folk singer who sings only prayers or um, you know, traditional songs, and then her voice is used to create something crude or vulgar. Or let's say my writing style is being remixed by these LMs to build content for a criminal just because he's ready to pay $15 a month? Where do I stand as a creative person, as an artist? If a brand as powerful and popular as Studio Ghibli can see their evident trademark style be recreated to this level, where can I, as a small artist, stand against these tech giants?

Speaker: 8:05

Recently, OpenAI said it's going to allow erotica for their adult users, and frankly, that thought creeped me out. Because at the end of the day, it's an LM. And it is going to use its existing imagery to create visuals for the for its adult audience. Yes, it won't match any individual or human being, but it will definitely create carry a small particle of a very real human being. The images that people uploaded for these fun trends, it's gonna be remixed for something something just beyond our imagination. Just think about all the images that the world has voluntarily donated to the AI machine and what it plans to make from it.

Speaker: 8:58

But my biggest concern and honestly genuine fear is the colonization of the human form of expression by these tech bros. What I mean and how I see it is this artificial intelligence lobby, these companies who are heavily invested in LLM models and artificial intelligence at large, they're working on a two-pronged strategy. They want to handicap you and then they will control you. How? Well, generative AI is going after entry and mid-level jobs in the creative domain. It is designed and is being trained to create art in all forms, from screenplays to music to graphic design to animation, everything. And what will happen is eventually AI would start taking over traditional forms of content creation and entertainment. It's already happening. Your social media is filled with AI-generated videos. It would start taking over the content creation part, not in totality, but to a sizable extent. Why? Because it's quicker, it's easier to manage, the turnaround time is short, it's easier to redo and correct mistakes, there's minimal human interference, and it's quicker at a cheaper price, at least for now. And if you think that future is far, far away, just think where generative AI was five years ago. Creative AI, and when I say creative AI, I mean artificial intelligence or tools which are being built with the sole focus of uh creating art, generating art. Well, they're going to go mainstream. And when I say mainstream, what I mean is at some point of time in near future, there would be human-generated current content and AI-generated content side by side. And at some point of time, it would be very difficult to tell what's human-generated and what's AI generated. This wave of change would eventually lead to lesser investments in human-first artistic products at large. And anything that attracts less investments would create lesser jobs. Lesser jobs means that the art and the craft would be studied and pursued by lesser number of people. If there are no job opportunities in a particular segment, people would not pursue it. So ultimately, the pool of artists would shrink. Lesser money, lesser artists, and more dependency on AI. Now, this is not going to impact everyone. The top 1%, the naturally talented, God-gifted ones, would keep on creating art and keep on succeeding. Their art would flourish. I am worried about the rest 99% who need time to spend with their art and who need paid opportunities to understand and find their own unique voice, their unique expression.

Speaker: 12:26

Generative AI would definitely take away jobs of actors, directors, musicians, writers, advertisers, accountants, animators, designers. Oh god, the list is endless. I'm also sure that humanity would adjust and adapt to this change like we did when computers were introduced. But the playing field is definitely changing and is changing drastically. On one hand, the opportunities for creative roots and careers would eventually reduce. And on the other hand, humanity as a whole is somehow delegating its capacity to create art to artificial intelligence. Students are using AI to write papers, they're using AI to create poetry and stories and movies without any basic understanding or spending time with the craft or the process of learning the art. We are giving away the neurological pathways needed to learn art to artificial intelligence. I mean people are using AI to write their wedding vows. AI is slowly untangling the human capacity to look inside our souls and create something genuine, our connections to ourselves. I'm sure many of you would relate that a large number of people depend on AI these days to write basic messages and emails. Yes, it saves time, yes, it looks very clean and professional, but it also robs you from the practice and the and the capability to express yourself coherently. And all this delegating of our expressive capacities is creating a cultural problem. What is happening is we are becoming more intolerant of the truth, of reality, and of difficult emotions. Recently, a movie with a tragic ending was converted into a happier ending using artificial intelligence, though it was criticized by almost everyone. But but I'm sure soon a new industry or a new service would start offering where people would start offering services where people would choose the direction and the tone of the stories that they want to consume, which matches their moods and their preferences. This is colonization on an emotional and psychological level. It is handicapping you via customization.

Speaker: 15:18

We are being slowly trained to expect every piece of art as not a vision of the writer or the creator of the art, not a sacrosant, but available for customization. This expectation that every movie, every book, every sad song to be frictionlessly adapted to our emotional preferences is a recipe to lose lose our critical thinking. I mean, we need critical friction to grow as a society. How is a society going to grow if it's not challenged? If it's not made to face the uncomfortable truth. The paralysis is setting in. Humanity is building its own handicap one prompt at a time.

Speaker: 16:15

But the scariest part for me of this entire artificial intelligence revolution, the artificial intelligence age is control. See, art is resistance. Art has has always been the foundation of expressing dissent. The human voice, the human expression against oppression has come through writing, singing, painting, through entertainment across history. It's so natural to us. I'm I mean I'm pretty sure there must be some Stone Age cave painting dissing some tribal overlord. It's the human way. When we are choked and when we are full of emotion, it comes out as art.

Speaker: 17:06

Do you think the prompt writing trained human mind and the generative AI would ever be able to create a bella job? Or give a slogan like do or die or write 1984? Most importantly, do you think that these companies would not track and inform the men in power about your rebellious thoughts? Or create a counter strategy immediately. Since all major communication platforms are AI powered or monitored, how are people going to spread and communicate a thought? Microsoft is scraping through your documents. Google is reading your emails all for AI. On one hand, we are dimming our capacity to express ourselves by delegating creative projects to artificial intelligence. And on the other hand, our thoughts, our art, are constantly being monitored. Just think it this way. If you forget how to express, how are you going to resist? How are you going to organize? How are you going to rebel? They they have been controlling you, but they have somehow cracked a way to control your thoughts to a certain extent. And man, that is crazy.

Speaker: 18:38

I'm not against using artificial intelligence as a tool to research or build to help us grow to support human creativity. But the moment it is pitched against a human being, the ethical lines get blurred. And right now, where humanity stands, LLMs are pitched against human creativity. So yes, there's no denying of the fact that how we create art, how we consume art is changing. And there's also not denying the fact that the machines are going to get louder. Art would definitely survive. But would it thrive? I don't think so. And that's all for this episode.

Speaker: 19:28

Thank you so much for listening. See you next week.