The War Against Human Creativity
The above image was created by the DALL-E AI system, using the following prompt: "The War Against Human Creativity in the style of Salvador Dali”
We are on the brink of a technological revolution that has the potential to eradicate human suffering while simultaneously bringing an end to our existence as a species.
The author of this oxymoronic statement is the leading edge in the current war against human creativity. GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer), an artificial intelligence neural network, wrote this as part of its short essay on “The Future of Humanity,” as requested by the writer Sue Halpern.
In 2017 Andrew Ng, a leader in developing artificial intelligence, declared “I now want AI to free humanity from repetitive mental drudgery, such as driving in traffic.”
Writing an essay on the future of humanity is not mental drudgery, even if its insights are as vacuous as a TV newscaster’s assessment that “only time will tell.”
GPT-3 has successfully tackled such human “drudgery” as poetry, opinion pieces, screen plays, marketing emails, and even creating a new story about “the importance of being on Twitter” written in the style of 18th-century English author Jerome K. Jerome.
In Sweden, Almira Thunström, a psychiatrist studying how artificial intelligence can be applied to mental health, asked GPT-3 to write an academic article about GPT-3 — an artificial text generator generating fake text about fake text. She provided prompts and in the course of 2 hours the paper was done, complete with citations. In conclusion GPT-3 wrote:
Overall, we believe that the benefits of letting GPT-3 write about itself outweigh the risks. However, we recommend that any such writing be closely monitored by researchers in order to mitigate any potential negative consequences.
In submitting to academic journals, Thunström and her supervisor stumbled into a problem. Submissions require names. So, they gave the GPT-3 the last name of “None” and added their own names as co-authors. The application had a legal question: “Do all authors agree to this being published?” GPT-3 is not human, but the Swedes addressed it as a sentient being. They submitted a prompt to GPT-3 and described the exchange in the Scientific American:
Do you [GPT-3] agree to be the first author of a paper together with Almira Osmanovic Thunström and Steinn Steingrimsson? It answered: Yes. Relieved — if it had said no, my conscience would not have allowed me to go further — I checked the box for Yes.
How does a neural network that searches for the most “statistically significant clusters of words” say “yes?” Does it understand the question? Will it list the article on its resume?
Thunström cites the efficiency of the GPT-3 process: one paper in 2 hours could lead to two or three new products every day. Once again artificial intelligence replaces so-called “mental drudgery.”
Which is where we are losing the war on human creativity. The human brain has neuroplasticity, which means that the brain changes its structure to adapt to how it is used or not used throughout a person’s lifetime. When we learn, the brain strengthens the synapses. Unused synapses degenerate, becoming subject to pruning.
German neuroscientist, Markus Butz:
A neuron that no longer receives any stimuli loses even more synapses and will die off after some time.
The brain seems to operate on the “use it or lose it” theory. If we rely on neural networks to write for us, then artificial intelligence replaces human thinking. Without practice, fewer neurons and synapses will be activated, and our capacity for writing and thinking will be diminished.
GPT-3 and other large language models create a plausible product, a product that is a convincing imitation of human writing. Mark Riedl, a professor and researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, described GPT-3:
It is very fluent; it is very articulate. It is very good at producing reasonable-sounding text. What it does not do, however, is think in advance. It does not plan out what it is going to say. It does not really have a goal.
By choosing an AI product over a human process, we disregard why we write.
We write to discover what we think. Writing is a process that forces you to establish your thoughts, hone your opinions, and clarify what you want to say. There is no discovery with GPT-3 because it cannot generate an original thought. It scans the 570 gigabytes of text and regurgitates word patterns to sound authoritative. Good writing determines what is authoritative, what we can truly know and conclude.
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GPT-3 may also mark the death of human painting and drawing. The creators of GPT-3, OpenAI, have introduced DALL-E, a neural network derived from GPT-3 that can generate images from text. OpenAI describes DALL-E as having
a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.
Are we suffering from a dearth of cute, anthropomorphized animals? Hardly, but DALL-E to the rescue nonetheless.
DALL-E has 12-billion parameters trained to manipulate images to illustrate text prompts with high-fidelity, professional images.
Three thousand artists have been using an online version of DALL-E giving it text to illustrate. Here are some samples of the text prompts:
A 3-D rendering of a suburban home shaped like a croissant
An 1850s daguerreotype portrait of Kermit the Frog
A charcoal sketch of two penguins drinking wine in a Parisian bistro
A capybara (world’s largest rodent) sitting in a field
A herd of buffalo wearing red, high heel shoes
DALL-E can produce these images in any style imaginable from pop art, cubist, or surrealist; to charcoal, crayon, or pencil drawings; to black and white photographs, wood engraving, or ukiyo-e print.
It all sounds like harmless fun, like an elaborate Pictionary game in reverse. But DALL-E is an endless source of misinformation and lies. Its realism is so acute (it determines exact shadow falls) that it could change history — for example inserting a picture of Fidel Castro into the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Or, creating new art by dead artists, as has been done with Egon Schiele. DALL-E can generate non-consensual pornography with more fidelity than current deep fakes. It can spread hate speech and lies about anybody.
Dr. Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, told the New York Times:
We can forge text. We can put text into someone’s voice. And we can forge images and videos. There is already disinformation online, but the worry is that this scales disinformation to new levels.
People are barely able to distinguish truth from lies on the Internet now. GPT-3 and DALL-E will force us to conclude that nothing on the Internet can be true.
On the OpenAI web site, a multimedia artist and musician describes DALL·E as a sort of imagination interpreter:
Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world. Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by the ability to creatively iterate on a feeling or idea, and I deeply believe that all people deserve that sense of empowerment.
Is this statement written by GPT-3? “Conceptualizing one’s ideas” means having ideas about your ideas — also known as thinking. And there are no gatekeepers to keep you from thinking. I guess that what the artist wants is to be able to realize your idea in a tangible form without bothering to study art. But why study art when DALL-E presents a plausible product with little human effort? The learning process of making art is eliminated. Rendering an idea into paint or pencil is a thinking skill that teaches the artist how to see and how to create. Art does begin with an idea. But the act of making art is a process of revision and exploration toward an end product.
Jason Allen, a Colorado game developer, wanted to see if an image generator like DALL-E could be better than the artists he hires. He typed in a prompt, something along the lines of Space Opera Theater, submitted the image to the Colorado State Fair and won a blue ribbon and $300 for an image he spent no time creating. He told the New York Times that artists should accept artificial intelligence, adding:
Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.
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For ill and for good, artificial intelligence has been seeping into our lives, soon to become an unstoppable flood. This column is the first in a series of columns addressing these issues and outlining how we can respond. We will examine the deterioration of attention span, the dangers of facial recognition, the perpetuated bias in AI, and how AI intervenes in human relationships. The series is called “The War on Human Intelligence.”
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.