How Do We Survive Being Creatives During the AI Insurgence?
Being a creative person has always been hard. It’s hard to go to someone and ask them to look at your art, your book, your project. Each of those things is a piece of your soul that you have put on display, and you are asking people to love you. It can take you years to overcome that. But now, the harder part, at least for me, is getting to the point where you are getting your work seen.
The reason I say this is because every single social media platform has its own AI software, all of them are combing through your art, your pictures, your writing for “creative inspiration.” They have to use humanity in order to train the AI how to write and create art in a manner that people will find appealing, but what happens is that art they are combing is internalized and then regurgitated. So, later you are fighting against a computer enhanced version of your art to even be seen.
I’m not saying this to be negative, but rather to illustrate how hard it can be just to keep creating against the onslaught. There are times it feels absolutely hopeless and I wonder why I waste so many hours of my life on creative endeavors. The answer, at least for me, is that I am compelled to do it. It’s like there is a motor driving me to get these things outside of my head. All of it I do because I think that is the closest I can get to connecting to my humanity. It’s like touching a raw nerve. It hurts, but also, it reminds me I’m alive.
There are days, sometimes even weeks, when I spend the vast majority of my time doing nothing but being creative. I barely sleep, and I can get so wrapped up in a project that I spend all of my time doing everything I can to translate what I’m seeing out into the world. I am so worried that eventually there will be no need for me to create, that corporations and corrupt people will just use AI to take that joy of creation from me. I am far more worried about it than I like to admit.
This year I am not going to participate in NanoWriMo through their official website because everything uploaded will get fed into their idea. People who have been working on their stories could very well have the ideas stolen from them and uploaded to a print on demand service like Amazon before they are even ready to present them to an editor. This is a dangerous and slippery slope when we have no rules and morals on who can use what information for what purpose. And in hyper-capitalism fighting for the rights of individual creatives is going to be an uphill battle.
To be clear, I don’t mind using AI to get ideas or to write business emails or understand how SEO works. I know there are plenty of people who use it ethically. My worry is that humanity has never been one to stick to ethics, especially not when there is money to be made.
