I consider myself an “internet native”. Being of the generation that I am, I remember when the internet first started to become a thing once we started getting dial-up at home.
I remember clearly the level of excitement of being able to reach a much bigger world from my small bedroom. I also of course remember the frustration of getting a phone call home, leading to my internet connection to suddenly drop (look it up kids, that was a real issue we had!)
In those days, I also remember the freedom and the creativity that was flowing from every corner of the web. I got my creative start on DeviantArt, still an amazing community for the creative arts (side bar: I’ve logged it today for the first time in probably 6/7 years, wow things have changed!). We were doing monthly contests that all started from a simple prompt to see who could create the best visual representation of such abstract prompt; with the results being judged by a panel of humans…
No doubts I can see the parallels with what’s happening with AI today. A human sets a prompt, a machine generates some options, the same human judges the results and picks a winner.
We always had some issues with IP and copyright in the digital world. As much as you could place watermarks or use licenses, your digital creation has always been one right click away from being taken and re-used, with the original author not being able then to enjoy the rewards of their own creations.
The silver lining of the situation was that with only humans involved, the scale of the takeover could always only be small.
Enter AI and the infinite drive and desire for light-speed growth. Once you remove the human element, things can now happen and a completely different scale. Not just that, the main element we are losing is shame. People would feel or would be made feel a sense of shame when being caught with someone else’s art in their possession. Machines (for better or worse) can’t feel shame. The only thing they see is an infinite succession of 1 and 0s that they can’t interpret as beautiful pieces of creation, they can only see them as the next logical step in a fairly rigid mechanism that’s been coded for them.
I’m honestly not sure how to feel or react in relation to the rapid escalation we are seeing in the fight between humans and AI. One thing for certain is that if boundaries are set, those boundaries should always be respected, no matter who the various parties are.
Humanity has always seen a constant need for moving forward and evolving. The spark of creativity that happens at the back of our brains has been responsible for every massive jump forward we’ve ever seen. If you’ve read history books, you also know that all big changes have been plagued with massive disruption that significantly changed people’s lives. No significant change ever happened without destroying some else’s business. It’s never easy nor fun to discuss these changes, and I suspect this time around will be the same.
The tech/digital sphere is up in arms against AI systems and their “need” to scrape the entirety of the internet in order to feed their models. Models which are then used by the common man to generate results that are taking away from the need to hire a creative person in the first place.
Stop me if you’ve seen this before. When steam powered machines became a thing, we didn’t need anymore thousands of people doing that same manual labour. It was an incredibly difficult transition, but the world had to go through it, to come out stronger on the other side.
I think what’s also different this time, is the level of access to news we have. In the past, people would have learned about the changes once they had already happened and the deed was done. Nowadays we are witnessing the changes in real time and this is clearly scary. You see daily a drip feeding of small changes that when zooming out have already amounted to a significant shift.
Of course it’s not just tech, lots of different sectors have been affected by AI in different ways. So far, the areas where AI is seen as a collaborator rather than a threat are the ones having a slight better time with it. Other sectors where AI instead is seen as a replacement are the ones with pitchforks out and understandably so.
So what shall we do about it? That’s the million dollar question I guess.
Fundamentally I don’t believe we have a good or correct answer. And I don’t believe we will ever get to a place where all parties will be ok with it. It’s just not how human evolution works.
So what then? I personally believe things will get segregated more and more into smaller niches. Same as with what we’ve seen with the original internet: the vast majority of the population will stay at the higher level of AI, same as they’ve stayed at the highest level of internet and tv.
Underneath that layer is where we’ll continue to find specialised niches serving a more specialised audience, the same way the early internet forums where born out of the necessity of having likeminded people gathering together.
There’s never been a better time to find your niche.