Generative AI tools are being rapidly adopted in creative areas such as writing, image design and production, film, and voice acting. Are we happy to have artificial intelligence (AI) automate parts of work in the domain of arts and humanities? Or might we have reason to keep some areas of human endeavour – such as the creative arts – in human hands?
Wrong direction
Overall public sentiment toward AI seems to be turning sour. Some of this is driven by AI technology that’s not yet fit for purpose.
Attempts to use AI to further automate fast food service were rolled back by McDonald’s after viral reports of error-prone orders, while Google reportedly suspended its AI Overview feature after a flood of widely circulated failures, such as nutritional advice to eat a daily serving of rocks.
Yet there’s a deeper reason for the growing public disillusionment with AI, one that won’t go away but may instead get worse as the technology improves. It’s related to a sense that generative AI is encroaching unacceptably on humane values and creative endeavours, undermining the quality of the content produced in the cultural sector, along with the opportunities that creatives have to contribute to culture and be recognised and rewarded for their talents.
The backlash to generative AI was reflected in the negative reaction to a recent advertisement for Apple’s iPad, which showed books, musical instruments, and games being crushed by a hydraulic press. Even audiences at the SXSW festival, a notoriously tech-friendly audience, loudly booed a video promoting AI-focussed keynotes and panellists. The viral reach of a social media post by sci-fi/fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska seems to demonstrate that her sentiments are widely shared:
“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
The message is clear: what people truly want is for technology to make our lives easier or more meaningful by freeing up our time for creative activities, rather than taking over those creative activities from humans.
Instead, companies seem to be committed to forcing AI into any existing creative tool they can manage — a phenomenon hilariously and effectively summarised in a popular meme labelled ‘Unwanted AI’, in which one child encases the head of another in the horn of her tuba – without evidence that this is something consumers actually welcome.
AI vs artists
Artists in various mediums have already been lodging their protests at the encroachment of AI upon human realms of creative endeavour.
Hollywood screenwriters staged a months-long strike in 2023, in large part to ensure that their work would be protected from an AI-driven takeover. Around the same time, the Screen Actors Guild went on strike to prevent AI from being used to reproduce actors’ digital likenesses.
Well-known writers including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, and George R.R. Martin have filed a class-action suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted works without permission.
The stock photography company Getty Images has filed suit against Stability AI, alleging that its image generator, Stable Diffusion, copied over 12 million images without permission.
The actress Scarlett Johansson, who famously voiced the AI character in the sci-fi movie ‘Her’, has objected to OpenAI’s new Sky chatbot voice, which is alleged to sound extremely similar to her own.
High-profile artists and filmmakers who use the Adobe software suite revolted in June in response to being locked out from their tools until they agreed to new terms of use, which many users perceived as giving Adobe illegitimate rights to access and extract value from their creative content.
And it’s not just famous artists whose work is at risk. Researchers found that job openings for freelance writers and coders decreased by over 20 per cent in the nine months after the release of ChatGPT.
Are these truly the outcomes we want from technological innovation – the loss or precarisation of jobs that both require and support human creativity? For many, the answer is ‘no’.
Humane technology
One of the authors of this article, Professor Shannon Vallor, recently wrote in MIT Technology Review that this disillusionment with technology results from a turn away from humane applications of tech; technology that brings us shared joy and comfort, rather than tech that strips our culture for parts.
But the growing backlash to tech – the ‘techlash’ – isn’t just a problem for corporate profits. It threatens public confidence in innovation more broadly, and undermines our collective will to develop and embrace the new science and technologies that can help us meet the enormous challenges currently facing the human family.
Professor Vallor’s recently published book, The AI Mirror, elaborates on this urgent need to shift the direction of technological development—particularly with regards to AI.
Addressing the multiple crises we are facing – runaway climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss, which could result in a global ecological collapse of the food chain – will require both humane innovation and significant investment of resources. But to get there, we need a new understanding of what technology is good for, what justifies our investment in it and the impulse to endlessly expand its role in our lives.
The Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute is dedicated to helping to build that new understanding, enabling us to create and sustain ‘futures worth wanting’ by unifying technical and moral knowledge.
The Centre’s experts accomplish this mission in part by bringing expertise in the arts and humanities to bear on social questions prompted by technological advances such as the recent boom in applications of generative artificial intelligence. These disciplines encourage us to articulate a vision of what we want from technology, rather than uncritically viewing every tech innovation as a form of progress.
In this spirit, it is worth asking whether the current push for the adoption of generative AI in multiple areas of creative endeavour is actually a desirable trend – or does it reflect a broken business model that pushes an unsuitable technology onto audiences who never asked for it?
The Centre for Technomoral Futures is dedicated to supporting the redirection of technological innovation to humane ends. Efficiency isn’t valuable if it makes an inhumane process quicker and cheaper. Automation isn’t progress if it devalues human contributions to the culture that sustains us. Our researchers’ projects highlight the need to put AI and other forms of data-driven innovation in service of humanistic goals, and to critically evaluate technology’s worth by that standard. Here are just some examples:
- Understanding the ethical integration of AI in human creative spaces.
- Developing models of collective ownership and governance of agricultural data.
- Creating a responsibility framework for the trustworthy use of autonomous systems in fields such as health, robotics, and finance.
- Investigating the ethics of using AI to augment human reasoning in international law.
- Exploring digital services that respond to the hopes and fears of ageing populations.
- Studying the ethical consequences of AI adoption by Scottish social enterprises.
- Designing democratic public dialogues around novel technologies such as AI.
- Identifying challenges for fairness in the use of AI in credit and finance decisions.
- Evaluating policies for the ethical use of AI in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources.
- Understanding public sector automation’s impact on the rule of law.
Everyone at the Centre for Technomoral Futures works to help reinvigorate a humane notion of technology as legitimised by a moral reason for existing: tools to help us serve and care for others, to help us repair, sustain and enrich life, and to help us develop and exercise our most vital and cherished capabilities—not automate them away. Only this kind of technology can restore the public’s damaged trust and confidence in innovation.
If the growing techlash can convince major players in the tech industry that they need to embrace that vision too, we will greatly increase our chances at building a future with AI that is both inspiring and sustainable.
Read more on the use of AI in creativity
Picture credits: AI city – credit Emily Rand and LOTI; AI silicon clouds collage – Catherine Breslin and Tania Duarte.
