Artificial Intelligence: is it a boon or a bust?

The recent rise in the use of AI, or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, has been at the fore­front of the news late­ly. AI seems to be every­where, mak­ing every­thing from videos to art to the writ­ten word. It may be eas­i­er to use a machine to do things, but is it better?

I think the first time I heard about a com­put­er that could do what to me is unbe­liev­able was a news sto­ry fea­tur­ing videos that looked and sound­ed exact­ly like Tom Cruise but were cre­at­ed by com­put­er pro­grams called deep fakes. The video was fea­tured in a news sto­ry on 60 Minutes by Bill Whitaker. During the spot, the process was demon­strat­ed by cre­at­ing a video that looked and sound­ed exact­ly like Bill Whitaker — but was noth­ing he had ever actu­al­ly said or done.

Several weeks ago, CBS Sunday Morning fea­tured com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed art — a pic­ture cre­at­ed sim­ply by speak­ing a gen­er­al descrip­tion and paint­ing style into one of sev­er­al com­put­er pro­grams. No human artist’s paint­brush ever touched an actu­al can­vas. I find it dif­fi­cult to find val­ue in a paint­ing that lacks the emo­tion and expres­sion any artist adds to their art.

More recent­ly on Sunday Morning, a web ser­vice called ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) was dis­cussed that can write any­thing from a let­ter to a col­lege-lev­el essay, from a poem to a com­put­er pro­gram. I may have been tempt­ed to try it in my col­lege days to com­plete those last-minute assign­ments if it had been around.

None of the AI-cre­at­ed cre­ations was any­thing I would con­sid­er real art. Real art, to me, requires time, focused thought­ful­ness, and, most of all, imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. Imagination is some­thing that is strict­ly a human trait, and one that is becom­ing increas­ing­ly rare as more is done with computers.

On the oth­er hand, the poten­tial for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to enhance our lives is real. AI could be used for tutor­ing, to make learn­ing any­thing from alge­bra to anoth­er lan­guage faster and more effec­tive. It could be used to help stu­dents learn how to spell and use words in a way that enhances lit­er­a­ture rather than sim­ply spelling and grammar. 

Even the ever-increas­ing use of voice­mail rather than an actu­al per­son for cus­tomer ser­vice could be much less frus­trat­ing through AI.

I’ve long been a fan of com­put­ers and what they can do, but, as in most every­thing, there are both pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives to using them. Ethical ques­tions are raised as to the uses of AI. The end result of rely­ing too much on AI, I fear, would be the loss to us of cre­ativ­i­ty and true artis­tic tal­ent. The loss of imag­i­na­tion could not only depress our art, but it could affect our abil­i­ty to cre­ate things like new inven­tions that would make our lives bet­ter. Still, it depends on how this new tech­nol­o­gy is used before we’ll know if our lives are improved by it.

Editor’s note: In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I feel com­pelled to note that we have exper­i­ment­ed with AI-gen­er­at­ed images a cou­ple of times here. While I cer­tain­ly agree with Lynn about the lack of imag­i­na­tion and true cre­ativ­i­ty in this type of “art,” there are some use cas­es for it. For exam­ple, when search­ing through stock image data­bas­es for a very spe­cif­ic scene we wish to por­tray for a sto­ry, it’s some­times tough to find just the right image. But when you use AI to gen­er­ate “an impres­sion­ist style paint­ing of a vault near a big oak tree amid the ruins of a burned-out house,” you may just get lucky with AI.