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I've been wondering if my creative work will matter in the future if Ai-made content is the standard. And will we all be conditioned to think that 'good' creative work equals Ai-made content.
For businesses, the Ai content is controllable, consistent, and cheaper to make, so why wouldn't they pivot toward a preference for the machine versions. Customers might also begin to prefer the Ai avatar to a human selling them goods, ideas, and information. We've seen Lil Miquela, Shudu Gram, and Blawko instagrams and although they aren't real, they sure know how to keep our human eyes fixed on them. For the student, artist, and creative maker of things, having the skill to use the generative Ai tools and incorporate them in one's work may be a necessity and requirement in the future, too. Recently, at an Ai themed creative industry virtual meeting it was suggested that this type of Ai skillset will be necessary tool in a world demanding efficiency and quick turnarounds. Often a client will need numerous iterations of a design which can be time consuming to create. The generative Ai tools can quickly create multiple version of a product in less time. So why not use the generative Ai tools and let it be your collaborator? All of this Ai talk makes me wonder if am I against Ai in the creative arts or am I for it. I know that I am questioning how it will be used, and what creative work will be diminished, while also finding myself eagerly testing the newest generative Ai technology. In the past, I had positive and ambivalent feelings about Ai tools since it was helpful for dealing with large datasets, enabling scientists and researchers to mine the data for relevant insights and conclusions in both the hard and social sciences. With the launching of OpenAi's GPT-4, Meta's LLaMA 2, Google's Bard and Gemini, and the more recent Baidu's Ernie Bot and France's Mistral AI, are the many generative Ai tools for writing, image making, and research likely to displace humans in the near future. It's worrisome and at times it's annoying as I hear people advocate that all we need to do is shift our perspective and see Ai as our collaborator. I have collaborated with the generative Ai tools on creative assignments. In recent months I've worked with a few generative Ai video and audio programs creating advertisements, informational videos, and course content. I've made fake virtual models, actors, and teachers with these programs. Am I contributing to the replacement of humans or simply showing how avatars can be used to disseminate information in a new way? I'm reminded of that Robin Wright movie, The Congress, where she was a human actress made obsolete as she was digitalized on screen and could now be programmed to play any character, any age, in any time, forever. So, how realistic can a digitized Frankenstein-ed fake person really be at this time? Below are a few of my generative Ai videos where I face swap, voice change, and body flip avatars to read text I've pulled from websites and reworked as ads/informational videos.
So, are these generative Ai tools a gimmick we will tire of? Is it simply offering a way to quickly push lots of content online for internet spiders to pick up, which in turn could increase some humans' earning potential as viewers watch the avatars. It's possible. Human's are expensive and not perfectly malleable at the click of a key. But with writing and researching, should human thoughts become something devised by a computer. Will this lead to more homogenized way of thinking? So many questions and no solid answers.
Experientially, I can say, I'm mixed in my feelings about generative Ai programs. Recently, I eagerly clicked on a podcast about Ai innovations. Each episode had a compelling title, but after a short bit, I realized this is an Ai voice talking. I didn't like the consistent, almost repetitive voice sound in my ear, nor what began to feel like a machine reading some text. If a human were conversationally talking through the same content, I would have stayed listening. Why? Well, psychologically, with the Ai voice I felt like, why listen, no commitment required to a machine. I also felt a little tricked that some person programmed this podcast and lured me under the pretext there would be a human here. What if I taught a whole class with Ai made videos, would my students feel tricked? Entertained at first I'm sure with my multiple morphed voices and faces. But maybe, they would begin to miss all the spontaneous possibility of one living human's thoughts, mistakes, connections, experiences, sounds, and personality. I guess I could hope they would choose me over an Ai avatar controlled by me. But what if, as tech keeps progressing, the machine and its avatar army begins generating its own summarized text based on all my research and lecture. As some know, Zoom Ai companion can summarize my lectures already, so why not now imagine a future where Ai instructors/lecturers/professors impersonating real humans begin to.........I don't know, demand.... increased productivity... and sacrifices, ha. Ahhh, so much to worry about in 2024.  In the past year since November 2022, I've attended so many virtual meetings focused on Ai. Often speakers raised concerns about Ai and how it will impact various work situations from creative industries to doctors and healthcare of the future. (Photo from Pixabay Gerd Altmann) Here are a few notes from 2 recents talks since I constantly think about how human work will be transformed in the future 
 More recently, I attended this talk,
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