Will AI Replace Writers and Artists?

A Conversation with Assistant

I decided to begin my investigation by conversing with the “competition.” I asked Assistant to describe itself, and it replied,

I am Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am a machine learning model that has been trained on a dataset of human-generated text and can generate human-like text in response to prompts given to me. I can answer questions, provide information, and have conversations on a wide range of topics.

So basically, it is a program that has been fed a huge amount of information and uses that information to spit out responses to prompts that it is given. A lot of people are concerned about the possibility of AI taking human jobs, so I asked it if it was going to take jobs from human writers like me. It responded,

As a language model, I am able to generate human-like text that is coherent and follows the rules of grammar and syntax. However, I am not able to experience emotions or have personal experiences, which are important elements of many types of writing. Additionally, my responses are based on the information that I have been trained on, and I do not have access to new information or the ability to browse the internet.

Therefore, while I may be able to assist with certain writing tasks, it is unlikely that I could fully replace a human writer. Human writers are able to bring their own unique perspectives, experiences, and emotions to their writing, which cannot be replicated by a machine.

Given that emotional robots tend to be the premise for futuristic dystopian movies, I suppose we can be thankful its programmers did not imbue Assistant with emotions!

Because there are issues of copyright associated with some AI-generated content, I asked it if its answers could possibly be plagiarized from other sources on the internet, and it replied,

No, my answers are not plagiarized. As a language model, I am able to generate original responses to questions based on the information that I have been trained on. I do not have access to the internet and do not copy content from other sources.

I also asked the AI to write poems in several styles (limerick, Haiku) and to copy specific poets (Shakespeare, Wordsworth). The results followed the various rules, but were clearly doggerel. If you are a lyricist or poet, I don’t think you need to fear AI anytime soon!

AI Art

I decided to see whether AI could illustrate this article, so I gave several popular AI art-generation tools the prompt “mechanical hand holding a pen.” Most of the results had something resembling a hand, something resembling a pen, and a mechanical aspect—but no hands holding pens. Sometimes the hand was not anatomically accurate or parts of the image seemed mashed together. A search for the same image in several image databases supplied by humans turned up multiple relevant and visually pleasing results. While a simpler prompt may have yielded better results, this real-world test shows that art AI also has a way to go.

There are also copyright and plagiarism concerns surrounding these art programs.

There are also copyright and plagiarism concerns surrounding these art programs. They are “trained” with billions of images pulled from the internet without the permission of the original copyright holders—so is any art generated by AI an act of plagiarism? While the creators of these programs say that the AI is only trained on the images and doesn’t copy them, some activists have shown that the “creative” ability of these programs is actually very limited and at least sometimes produces images that are so similar to original artists that it arguably violates their copyright.

Ultimately, I had no way of knowing whether the best images I generated were violating someone’s copyright, so it would not be ethical to publish them with this article.

God Gave Humans the Creativity They Program into AI

Humans are creative because we are created in God’s, the Creator’s, image. A musician can think of a melody, notate it, and play it. A painter can conceive an image in his mind, gather his paints, and put the image on a canvas. An author can use the rules of grammar and logic to lay out the case for an argument or describe the adventures of fictional characters living in a fantasy world. God’s creation is on a different order because he created from nothing, while we use the minds and matter he created.

AI art and writing programs are in some ways created in humans’ image, because they are trained on and limited by the written and artistic works in the AI’s database. If an art AI is not loaded with an image of the Eiffel Tower, it cannot produce it. And if it is loaded with that image, it may very well be plagiarizing it when it produces a very similar one in response to a prompt! AI will never be truly creative; even if an AI is programmed to seem creative, it will only be following its programming.

AI Is Yet Another Tool for Humans to Use

AI will never become the equal of human artists because the creators of AI will never be equal to mankind’s Creator!

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s father is eventually employed to service the robot that took his job, and his family’s fortunes are restored. In a similar way, even if AI becomes a better and better tool, it will be because of the efforts of human programmers, and human artists and writers will supply the databases for these programs.

AI will never become the equal of human artists because the creators of AI will never be equal to mankind’s Creator!