Thoughts on
PAINT THE STARS
“The world is now an emulation of a mimicry of a reproduction of a counterfeit echo.”
I'm grateful to exist during one of those moments in human history where everything is about to change. Not only that, but AI has the potential to become the biggest change our species has ever undertaken.
I'm also very scared. Like Sonja, I am worried that gen-AI will steal human work and destroy my dreams of being an artist. Like Pari, I am eager to use AI to my advantage, yet wary of the ever-blurring line between capitalism and artistic integrity. Like Alex, I dread the existential implications of people being able to create something identical to human art at the press of a button.
Yes, when gen-AI advances, it will be the end for many art careers. Concept artists, scriptwriters, songwriters, voice actors, architects, and more could be ousted by what essentially comes down to a cost-saving strategy. This is a travesty; the tech companies are wrong for taking art and data without artists’ permission and without artists seeing proper compensation, and anyone who compares an AI’s data scraping training process to how the human mind learns is deluding themselves.
Unfortunately, as Pari insists, this is all inevitable. But just because the tech is inevitable doesn’t mean artists will lose.
As the characters hopefully learn at the end of the story (and as I learned while writing it), art itself is not going anywhere. If anything, generative AI will allow human art to reemerge as more distinguished than ever before: more valuable, further relied upon by creators and fans alike as a form of expression, sorting out the consumerist marketeering from art that truly comes from the heart.
“Mark, thanks for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”
I have a confession: When I first began this novella, I actually wanted to “co-author” the story with GPT-4.
The idea was to make the story end with a hopeful message about AI merging with humans, helping one another make great art and take our civilization to the next creative level. This is commonly known in sci-fi as “synthesis,” and it has been done enough times. This version of the story would have been more speculative, with ARTEMIS as a more advanced, more emotional character in the story with hints at its own artistic agency.
However, the more I worked with GPT-4, the stupider I realized it was. The program’s prose was hot garbage that read like a 4th grade assignment. GPT-4 even proved hazardous as a research assistant due to its tendency to just produce things that are flat out wrong (Ted Chiang discusses this in his excellent op-ed, “Chat GPT is a blurry JPEG of the web”). I am pretty sure the only positive thing I can say about GPT-4’s capabilities as a writing companion was that is was quite helpful as a thesaurus—that is, it could help me find the perfect word, or remember a saying or phrase I’d lost at the tip of my tongue. Overall, though, my experience with the bot as a writing assistant was so negative that, on top of everything I had learned about the unethical training practices, it shifted the entire outcome and themes of this story.
I guess my point is to say that gen-AI is still—as a certain Irish painter put it—“shite.”