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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1491529
In 2022, OpenAI – one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research laboratories – released the text generator ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E 2. While both programs represent monumental leaps in natural language processing and image generation, they’ve also been met with apprehension. Some critics have eulogized the college essay, while others have even proclaimed the death of art. But to what extent does this technology really interfere with creativity? After all, for the technology to generate an image or essay, a human still has to describe the task to be completed. The better that description – the more accurate, the more detailed – the better the results. After a result is generated, some further human tweaking and feedback may be needed – touching up the art, editing the text or asking the technology to create a new draft in response to revised specifications. Even the DALL-E 2 art piece that recently won first prize in the Colorado State Fair’s digital arts competition required a great deal of human “help” – approximately 80 hours’ worth of tweaking and refining the descriptive task needed to produce the desired result. It could be argued that by being freed from the tedious execution of our ideas – by focusing on just having ideas and describing them well to a machine – people can let the technology do the dirty work and can spend more time inventing. But in our work as philosophers at the Applied Ethics Center at University of Massachusetts Boston, we have written about the effects of AI on our everyday decision-making, the future of work and worker attitudes toward automation. Leaving aside the very real ramifications of robots displacing artists who are already underpaid, we believe that AI art devalues the act of artistic creation for both the artist and the public.