Thoughts On AI At The Start of 2024 - Sora
** This is a work in progress. Basically, some thoughts that wouldn’t go away. I will update this over the next couple of weeks as I think more about this and have more conversations. It’s complicated, but the costs are high.
Today was the announcement of “Sora” by OpenAI. It’s incredibly impressive. It can easily eliminate 70% of stock video needs at launch, before the inevitable refinements that will happen over the next 12-18 months.
There’s a lot of commentary today throughout the video creator community about AI and how it’s going to affect “artists “. But I hate it when we frame it as “it won’t stop true art” or “if you’re truly talented it won’t stop you” tropes and viral clips, from the glass-half-full crowd. The issue here is not that AI will ruin human creativity, or prevent the possibility of humans performing creative acts. It’s a false framing of the issue.
The challenge with AI is that it intersects between art and commerce. No artist is self-sustaining from their creative ideas and exposure alone. Every artist depends on commerce as a way to sustain themselves while developing their art. The cost of a good idea is 1,000 bad ones, and the cost of a great idea is 1,000 good ones.
So our issue here is that AI harvests all of the hard work, sourcing our collective ideas to provide good - great (mileage varies) as cheaply as possible, siphoning the profits from the actual laborers. It’s a creative version of the farming industry, nutrition at scale is no longer nutritious, but we don’t care, we still gorge ourselves with the modified versions of seeds and additives because they become the only thing available. Why? Did it kill all the farmers? No, it killed the profit and feasibility of actual farming. There is still money in farming, it’s just that the profits are harvested and redistributed to stockholders. (The intro to Lil Dicky’s latest video HAHAHAHA captures this conundrum perfectly…the art part, not the farming part.)
So it’s not that it will “kill creativity” or art. It’s that it will kill thousands of opportunities for artists to sustain themselves and focus on creating that art. It’s not that no artist will ever create again, it’s that we will lose countless artists and pieces of art due to the early harvesting of ideas and cheapening of the labor of art. We need to define more clearly the challenges that we will face with AI in the photo and video world.
There will still be opportunities for artists, but we get into a level of hypercompetition, exceptionalism and "whataboutism” that is not sustainable or realistic. They will say “If AI ruined everything then whatabout insert name of viral artist?” One of the favorite sayings in my photog groups is that: It’s only going to affect the people who are mediocre and who don’t “provide an experience.” We were all mediocre, and worse, once. Where does the next generation grow out of mediocrity? Frankly, there is an argument to be made that the photo community is already awash in mediocrity with good marketing and that real art and exceptional skill are a detriment to a successful photography career.
And if there’s one thing that social media and virality are doing in the art space is that they’re eliminating taste, and replacing it with convenience, repetition, and fame. We’re being manipulated, and marketed to, like a bad version of Don Draper’s ideas on Mad Men season 40. It’s empty inspiration calories. Just like when you finish a bag of chips, but you’re still eating…your soul feels empty, even when you’ve just gorged/streamed/scrolled/swiped/threaded/binged/ tweeted/DM/reshared/live-streamed “content.”
It’s not a matter of doomsday, or AI denial for me. I’m not interested in that false equivalency. It’s a matter of human choice and creativity to create a world where we the citizens of our communities and planet create the lives and societies that we want. A community where we incentivize the work and ideas of humanity, not the cheapest version with the highest markup, and resell for ROI for this quarterly earnings call.
I guess I’m asking for a true cost assessment of AI in art. I’m asking that datasets are built ethically, by getting explicit permission and compensating where appropriate. The algorithms are nothing, literally blank, incapable of any spontaneous creative outputs without our data to drive them. They are vehicles with no fuel or direction. The value, (the fuel and the direction) comes from our data, creativity, and personal lives. It’s a parasite in many ways, incapable of thriving without us as a host. We are necessary for its viability.
For example, Facebook has announced it’s using our Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp images to create its own image and text dataset is a gross invasion of privacy. We should all be compensated, or at minimum be explicitly asked to opt-in if they’re going to harvest our own data to repackage it and resell it to us as a line of service.
As we find with the fossil fuel companies and global warming, we are not accounting for the true cost of the technology, and instead we are subsidizing it, only to later find a problem so big that it’s nearly impossible to “solve”. Sure AI is cheaper than hiring Sally, but it will put Sally out of a job, and lower her income. Now she can afford less at her local stores, pay less local taxes, work another job, and spend less time with her family, while AI companies will win round after round of funding and celebratory quarterly earnings calls by extracting that value and making our communities and governments pay the cost. Meanwhile, we will blame Sally for being lazy and the government for being dysfunctional…and continue to celebrate the corporate boards.
We should consider an AI tax to repay the original contributors for providing the foundations of the AI knowledgebase that never belonged to a corporation to sell, fund the next generation of artists, and fund the local communities for the inevitable cost of layoffs and downsizing. The cost of AI is communal, so should the profits be. The AI companies should be compensated, but their true debts should also be paid.
I’m not against them making money, I’m against them not paying their fair share.
Afterthoughts from discussions:
I’m not against AI technology, for example, a company using AI to develop tools and a voice for its use, with its data, and using it for strategic analysis, customer support, or employee support, I see as a reasonable use of AI. Hooking up to your competitor’s infrastructure and using it against them, would be an unreasonable use.
2/27/24:
I read this article on PhotoPolitic and this part stuck out to me as true, but deceptive:
“In post-production, AI acts as a force multiplier, automating routine tasks such as editing and color correction. This technological support allows editors and artists to dedicate more energy to creative aspects, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in storytelling and visual effects.”
Sure, it lets us dedicate more time to “creative aspects,” but post-production is/was a creative aspect. How do the new tools work if not for copying (stealing?) the lessons learned from previous editors? So many techniques and “looks” that are rendered in AI were due to hours spent in post-production.
What I hear, is that we’re all overworked, and the cycle is unsustainable, so now the same system that has driven overwork and burnout is now using all of the hours spent, to feed machine learning and eliminate more jobs, but not necessarily giving us less work or more money…to be creative??
To mix creative ideas with "getting there as fast and effortlessly as possible” is a scary place to be for business and creativity…
I mean, I can smell the Red Bull-fueled fever-pitch stream of ADD ideas that just won’t stop. My question is what is the value here? It costs him nothing and he is basically picking the brains of creatives, then acting like the only person with ideas…
Great video about why AI is the Greatest Art Heist in history.
This is such an important part of the conversation for generative, AI, specifically when it comes to art.
This video is fantastic because it starts with an informed and detailed explanation of exactly what has happened, and why it’s unethical.
It’s not about being afraid of AI or technology or trying to turn us all into Luddites. I would love to have generative AI where the people who built the information of the models are fairly compensated, and the data has been collected ethically.
Given the fervor with which companies are trying to suppress this and maximize profits and investment, it’s proof that we are not overreacting, there is a lot at stake, and if not now, when?
Quotes:
The current AI model (LAION -5B) bypassed the need to get consent and other data laws, was because it was created for research, not for for-profit corporations.
“If they were sourcing content from people who opted-in they would not have a competitive product” (7:59)
Title photo created by me in Midjourney with a prompt: black and white portraits in the style of Richard Avedon.