Stop outsourcing creativity

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𝐓𝐋/𝐃𝐑: The #AI race is on and we are at risk of having to potentially redefine what makes us human.

My little niece. She looks much better than me pondering the world.

I have always loved technology - since I was born, really. Not that I remember that far back, but one of my first memories is my dad bringing home a computer up four flights of stairs. Twice, actually - once for the CRT monitor and once for the main tower.

Moving on a few decades, I’m now not really a coder, but not really a complete how-do-I-open-a-PDF kind of guy either. I sit in that limbo state where I can set up a website but haven’t yet learned Python, kept up with technology and spent hours researching, rejigging and redefining AI models. Repetitive tasks? Automated. Data and numbers? Consolidated. Statistical analysis? Just tell me your sigma.

Something today, though made me think deeper: AI human voice generation for music is now a thing. I applaud the ingenuity and efforts to deliver this, but the world is now in a weird place where music - arguably one of the human needs - can be “conceived” by AI, producing the genre and typology, feed it into an algorithm of maximising consumption, be processed to generate the instrumentation and human voice, completely removing the need for singing abilities and talent.

What scares me most is that we are now actively outsourcing art to an algorithm.

You see, as humans we have been incredible at outsourcing mundane tasks keeping those that need a bit more grey matter for ourselves. Need to travel long distances? Horses! Longer ones? Cars, planes and spaceships. Need to convey something to the masses? Writing. Manuscripts. Printing. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

But the content has always remained human. Creativity and critical thinking could not be outsourced. It’s what made us human after all. We drew inspiration from everything around us to put together something new and fresh, and the net direction of all those creative elements got us to where we are today. With AI, Beethoven would never have composed Eroica or the Ninth Symphony. No Gaudí’s Sagrada Família either.

One can argue that we are optimising the journey, but Constantine Cavafy put it aptly in Ithaca, the destination is but point in time; the road itself should be “full of adventure, full of discovery”. Just imagine JRR Tolkien writing about Frodo simply using a drone to drop the ring in Mordor!

In real life, that translates to those mistakes and discoveries that make us, us. From penicillin to x-rays, post-its and microwave ovens, life would be different with precise automation of the discovery process. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an eschatological post - AI brings a lot of benefits too, such as faster drug discovery and R&D.

But the right tool for the right job, right? We are blurring the lines.

Art is an expression of need and a need for expression. We shouldn’t be outsourcing that!