‘How Did Somebody Make This?’ ⇥ theoatmeal.com
AI has accelerated our abilities like that drug from the movie Limitless. It’s writing our papers, analyzing our bloodwork, and planning our weddings. Now your average Keith has the critical thinking abilities of a supercomputer running at ten-trilion teraclops per floppyshart.
It enables ordinary minds to have extraordinary abilities.
Inman’s thoughts on A.I. tools for creativity are similar to my own. There are plenty of ways to use them to lighten the load on mundane and uncreative tasks. But whole-cloth generation in a fake social network is such a poor outcome.
I got the title of this post from near the top of the comic. It will stick with me. A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.
We all have ordinary minds that have been shaped by time and practice to be able to do different extraordinary things. Each of us cannot do most of the skill-dependent things most other people in the world can do. In the right hands, A.I. tools can help produce some fantastic art, but the art probably will not come from the collective digital mind of everything scraped from the internet. It comes from people who think creatively and apply technology to that.