Last night I saw an amazing concert, which was opened by a not-so-amazing young rock group. They were fine, technically proficient, even sounded like a lot of music I like. Something was missing, though. Their own voice, their own style. It sounded like a pale imitation of someone else’s music and lacked the extra-oomph to make it memorable.
It got me thinking about A.I. Hopefully, we all realize that both these large language models and the image generators are basically giant plagiarism machines. A.I. takes terrabytes of other people’s work as its data base, and then spits out something that is like the average of it all or at least some strange permutation of it — without citing where it got the ideas! In my field, that would be a huge, even fireable, ethical violation. But if it can make profit and funnel money upwards and away from the people who actually make the value, well that’s the name of the game in our economic system.
Let’s put aside the dangers of economic concentration, of putting artists and other creatives out of already scarce jobs, of computing too fast and powerful for humans to predict, control, or contain. Outside of all the potentially world ravaging implications, A.I. is fundamentally boring.
You see, like the band I saw last night, true creativity happens between the lines. Style is this sort of ephemeral thing, describable but not quite capturable or replicable. It’s the uniqueness of a voice, the particularity of a sound, the specificity of a look. Others can imitate it but it rarely lives up to the original. Style is a hard thing to develop. Most practitioners never create one of their own. As someone who teaches writers, I can tell you I repeatedly ask people, “Where’s your voice?” Most never find one.
A.I. doesn’t have a voice or a style because it’s not perceiving and understanding and synthesizing and analyzing the way humans do. It’s simply amalgamating, not evaluating. It can’t create something between the lines because it only “sees” the lines. So it produces thoroughly unoriginal, uninspired work.
Take the story and image my friend asked it to produce based off my last blog post:
Endless Loop: A Modern Take on "No Exit"
Chapter 1: The Excitement Begins Four strangers, each with their own secrets and regrets, found themselves strapped into the seats of an enormous roller coaster. The sky was a perfect shade of blue, the sun was shining, and the air was filled with the sounds of laughter and distant music from the amusement park. They exchanged tentative smiles, feeling the thrill of anticipation as the coaster began its ascent.
Chapter 2: The Thrill of the Ride As the roller coaster crested the first hill and plummeted down the other side, their screams of fear turned into shouts of exhilaration. The wind whipped through their hair, and for a moment, they forgot everything except the rush of the ride. They laughed and shouted, asking the operator for another round as soon as the ride ended. The coaster obliged, beginning its loop again.
Chapter 3: Doubt and Discomfort By the fifth loop, the initial excitement had begun to fade. What once felt thrilling now seemed endless and nauseating. One of the passengers, a young woman with a haunted look in her eyes, started to feel dizzy. The older man beside her, who had been laughing heartily at first, now looked pale and concerned. The others, too, began to show signs of distress.
Chapter 4: The Descent into Despair The roller coaster, now seemingly sentient, refused to stop. The hills and loops, once a source of joy, had become torturous. The passengers screamed for it to end, but their pleas were drowned out by the relentless roar of the ride. They were trapped in an endless cycle, the physical turmoil mirroring the turmoil within their souls.
Chapter 5: Revelation and Resignation As they continued to ride, unable to escape, the passengers began to talk. They shared stories of their lives, their regrets, and their desires. In the face of endless torment, they found a strange comfort in each other's company. The ride had become their purgatory, a place where they confronted themselves and each other.
Epilogue: No Exit The roller coaster continued its endless loop. The passengers, now resigned to their fate, no longer screamed or cried. They sat in silence, each lost in their thoughts, companions in their shared purgatory. The amusement park faded into the background, a distant memory of a world they once knew.
The story is … fine. Acceptable. Boring. Not memorable in the slightest. It lacks style and flair. It’s hollow, soulless. The image is creepy, bizarre. Yet also not original.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, as most people also struggle to have a unique style and to say or create something original. Yet if this is the product of A.I., as it seems to be, then the creatives likely shouldn’t fret. We still need your voices. Moreso now than ever.