Stephen Downes

OK, how do I express this? Here's the conclusion of this long O'Reilly article on humans, art and creativity: "The fundamental risk of AI 'artists' is that they will become so commonplace that it will feel pointless to pursue art, and that much of the art we consume will lose its fundamentally human qualities." Now, we humans have always made art, long before anyone thought of paying for it - long before there was even money. Why? What makes Taylor Swift better than an AI-generated singer-songwriter? My take is that it's not the content of the art, but instead, it's the provenance. I've written before about the human experience behind her work. Similarly, what's the difference between my videos and somewhat better photosets from Iceland and something a machine might create? It's that I was there and I'm reporting on the lived experience. There's nothing in the media that distinguishes between AI and human generated media, only in why it was made and why we're interested. If you want to get at why any of this matters, you have to look past the economics of it, and ask why it was ever made at all.