I like your reasoning and I agree. By putting AI use in context, you create a good argument for using AI in creative work. The knee-jerk AI is bad all of the time is not reasonable IMO. Still, courts have not weighed in on fair use yet for AI and that is one of the biggest hurdles to wider acceptance. Excellent article. One of your best, Matt
A very philosophical question. So, vision is the art, when you lay it out as you've done. And 'we' accepted that when humans were doing the underling work, but now that a computer mind is involved, is it the same or different. Let me get back to you on this one, Matt. Btw, really liked the Thalberg mention. I'm a fan. Guess just for what he stood for.
In the strange subculture of middle-aged/elderly men who remember their love of Silver Age Marvel comics (I am one, though hopefully not on the crazy end of the spectrum) you'll often encounter hate for Stan Lee, whom many fans deride because "the Marvel Method" meant that much of the story plotting was actually done by the artists. But I note that most of the same artists also worked for DC or Charlton at the time, or later got deals where they wrote their own stories at other publishers, and none of those ventures managed to bottle the lightning that was Marvel in the mid-'60s. Stan Lee may not have done much more than co-plot and script six or seven books a month ("much more" used there ironically, of course) but he was clearly the creative spirit that made it all happen.
AI means I'm belatedly getting a taste for that. Having decided to reissue all my old gamebooks for Kindle, I was faced with having to hyperlink every player option. With thousands of links across dozens of books, that would be a nightmare to do by hand. I asked Claude to write me a macro to apply all the hyperlinks automatically, and armed with that I was able to convert each book in about 90 seconds.
Ah, the film of Theseus. Or is that Doctor Theseus (see The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T)?
Seriously, film has always been recognized as a collaborative enterprise. The auteur theory was invented by critics who didn’t themselves make films, and didn’t sufficiently respect the supporting artists who shot 2nd unit, built sets, created costumes, choreographed action scenes, and so on.
Can these people all be replaced by AIs? Not at the present state of the art, and not in the near future: AIs as we know them now can use existing solutions to sole well-understood problems, but, AI startups to the contrary not withstanding, they can’t innovate or solve new problems.
Can these people all be replaced by AIs right now, today? No. Can some of them be replaced (or partly replaced) by AIs? Yes - and it's already happening. Digital set-building is rapidly replacing practical set-building, and a lot of that can be done by AI. Motion capture + digital costumes are replacing actual costumes, and that can be AI-assisted. Large battle scenes are frequently created digitally and choreographed by AI. Are they innovative? To an extent, yes, because they can create things that wouldn't be practical if they were done in the real world, and they often have a far larger pool of influences to draw on than any human.
However, my point wasn't about whether current AI is good enough to replace a human being in terms of quality. I was musing about how much of the creative process you can outsource and still be regarded as creative, and whether it makes any difference - from that specific standpoint - whether you're outsourcing it to a human or a machine. And although I used film as an example, the same principle applies to many, many other creative media.
I like your reasoning and I agree. By putting AI use in context, you create a good argument for using AI in creative work. The knee-jerk AI is bad all of the time is not reasonable IMO. Still, courts have not weighed in on fair use yet for AI and that is one of the biggest hurdles to wider acceptance. Excellent article. One of your best, Matt
A very philosophical question. So, vision is the art, when you lay it out as you've done. And 'we' accepted that when humans were doing the underling work, but now that a computer mind is involved, is it the same or different. Let me get back to you on this one, Matt. Btw, really liked the Thalberg mention. I'm a fan. Guess just for what he stood for.
In the strange subculture of middle-aged/elderly men who remember their love of Silver Age Marvel comics (I am one, though hopefully not on the crazy end of the spectrum) you'll often encounter hate for Stan Lee, whom many fans deride because "the Marvel Method" meant that much of the story plotting was actually done by the artists. But I note that most of the same artists also worked for DC or Charlton at the time, or later got deals where they wrote their own stories at other publishers, and none of those ventures managed to bottle the lightning that was Marvel in the mid-'60s. Stan Lee may not have done much more than co-plot and script six or seven books a month ("much more" used there ironically, of course) but he was clearly the creative spirit that made it all happen.
And let's not forget the Old Masters of the Renaissance who let their students do most of the work.
AI means I'm belatedly getting a taste for that. Having decided to reissue all my old gamebooks for Kindle, I was faced with having to hyperlink every player option. With thousands of links across dozens of books, that would be a nightmare to do by hand. I asked Claude to write me a macro to apply all the hyperlinks automatically, and armed with that I was able to convert each book in about 90 seconds.
Ah, the film of Theseus. Or is that Doctor Theseus (see The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T)?
Seriously, film has always been recognized as a collaborative enterprise. The auteur theory was invented by critics who didn’t themselves make films, and didn’t sufficiently respect the supporting artists who shot 2nd unit, built sets, created costumes, choreographed action scenes, and so on.
Can these people all be replaced by AIs? Not at the present state of the art, and not in the near future: AIs as we know them now can use existing solutions to sole well-understood problems, but, AI startups to the contrary not withstanding, they can’t innovate or solve new problems.
Can these people all be replaced by AIs right now, today? No. Can some of them be replaced (or partly replaced) by AIs? Yes - and it's already happening. Digital set-building is rapidly replacing practical set-building, and a lot of that can be done by AI. Motion capture + digital costumes are replacing actual costumes, and that can be AI-assisted. Large battle scenes are frequently created digitally and choreographed by AI. Are they innovative? To an extent, yes, because they can create things that wouldn't be practical if they were done in the real world, and they often have a far larger pool of influences to draw on than any human.
However, my point wasn't about whether current AI is good enough to replace a human being in terms of quality. I was musing about how much of the creative process you can outsource and still be regarded as creative, and whether it makes any difference - from that specific standpoint - whether you're outsourcing it to a human or a machine. And although I used film as an example, the same principle applies to many, many other creative media.