On December 1, 1913, something revolutionary happened. A simple modification made by Henry Ford reduced the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to one hour and thirty-three minutes. This simple innovation is credited to pioneer the way for automation. The newly invented automation had surely increased productivity, but it had also given rise to a new set of hysteria. Since then, the fear that automation will create mass unemployment has been surfacing in people’s minds. And with the rise of AI, it is safe to say that fear is still prevalent. But no such thing has happened as of yet. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job has been created. Moreover, the average standard of living has also increased dramatically. But there are good chances that the same thing may not happen in the future. ‘Will AI finally become capable to take over our jobs or will it sustain its role as an enhancer as it had done in the past’- is a question that is not so easy to answer.
There are two types of capabilities humans possess- physical and cognitive. Before AI, all automated inventions were capable of replacing humans’ raw physical ability. However, humans still retained a massive edge over machines when it came to cognitive ability. Machines might have the capacity to lift more products or manufacture a product quicker than a human but they could not think for themselves. However, with the invention of AI, machines now possess cognitive qualities as well such as decision-making and understanding human behavior and emotions, etc. Now, there are two fractions that have two polar outlooks on this matter.
AI as Productivity Enhancer
One fraction is pretty optimistic. They believe the cognitive development of AI will only increase human efficiency to a near-perfect that too in a short amount of time. For instance, the AI-generated artworks that get all the praise online are not as simple to create as one thinks it is. To get an on-point image, your prompts need to be on point too. At present, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney- all AI-image generators limit their prompts to the length of a tweet. Any longer and the prompts become confusing and the images turn into a concoction of mess. It will not be an exaggeration if one compares a prompt to a magical spell. With a precise prompt, you are not only creating new images but it is also possible to tweak those images into a variety of compositions. With a little nudge here and a little mix-and-match there, you can command the generator to give birth to a batch of new generations of images.
You see, a hidden craft is also in play here. But it varies from the craft we were familiar with. Now, creativity does not lie in an artist’s originality or art style, it lies behind the art of prompting. An analogy between the AI prompters and the elephant whisperers can be aptly used here. Similar to the elephant whisperers, these AI prompters can be called AI whisperers because they have cracked the code of the inner workings of AI. However, it does not necessarily mean the relationship between AI and artists is of a master and servant. Their relationship is like a collaboration. A command will not result in fruitful outcomes if the artist or designer is inapt to utilize the power of AI towards a unified vision. Therefore, we can witness a glistening possibility of AI-image generation emerging as a fine-art skill. In fact, new markets have already emerged. One such example is PromptBase.
PromptBase is a type of market where prompters can sell their prompts that create simple images such as emoticons, logos, icons, avatars, and game weapons. It is like clipart but instead of selling art, they sell prompts that generate the art. You can easily customize the images by adding more keywords, or tweaking the image as you need. So, instead of getting a fixed art, you get the option to alter the image as you need. Moreover, you can extract multiple versions from it.
ChatGPT can also be used for enhancing productivity in a similar way. Months of excruciating literature review can be shortened to a few seconds. Business analysis will not need to be as time-consuming as it used to be. With the correct prompt, you can also get the answer you desire. However, it will be too optimistic of us if we proceed without any caution.
No More Specialization!
A Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan had a peculiar experience with AI image generators. She started to notice that her name was frequently used as a prompt to generate art. Her once-unique art style which blends Art Nouveau and science fiction was no more unique. McKernan discovered that in Midjourney her name was used more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. She expressed her thoughts in one of her interviews, “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y. I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others to produce these images.”
McKernan was not alone in feeling a bit uneasy with the recent development. A lot of artists filed copyright lawsuits against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DreamUp. But these types of copyright claims in the visual rights are a bit tricky and sometimes favor the copier. Even though the hands of law may be bounded to accept it, it is pretty clear these artists have been robbed of their identities, their niches that they might have created with years of practice. For instance, it may have taken them ten to twelve years to specialize in digital arts. But now with the AI image generators their specializations have become obsolete. And I feel this is just the beginning. With the faster and faster development in the artificial intelligence sector, a skill will become obsolete before anyone can specialize in it. And then a new trend will come that will require different and newer sets of skills but before anyone could specialize in it that trend will also become old news.
For instance, prompting has now become a new important skill to navigate AI image or text generators and many have already started to commercialize this. But what is the guarantee that someone in the next one or two years will not come up with a software that will be able to generate precise prompts for AI and render this new skill obsolete?
Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say AI will decrease the number of experts in a particular field. There are two sides to a coin. One side seems optimistic that democratizes creativity. But just behind it is another dark side. Democratizing creativity is another way of saying.
Author- Nayeema Nusrat Arora
