How robots are re-drawing the rules of our culture
Robo authors and artists are more successful than you think. Ed Cumming asks: can you spot their work ?
As a features writer for The Telegraph, I often find myself wondering how long it will be before I’m replaced by Artificial Intellignce (AI)? After all, there are already plenty of software programmes that can generate simple articles on a variety of topics. And while my human mind might be able to come up with the occasional witty turn of phrase, I’m no match for the processing power of a computer when it comes to cranking out large volumes of content.
Were you fooled? I didn’t write the above. Jasper did. He is one of the programmes he is talking about. You give him a few prompts, and he delivers possible paragraphs, having run the suggestions through GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), a tool created by Openai, a San Franciscobased research lab. The software works a bit like your phone’s predictive text function. The difference is GPT-3 is trained on all the English on the internet, billions and billions of texts. All I wrote was: I am a journalist and a features writer on The Telegraph. How soon will I be replaced by AI?
For decades, experts have warned computers were coming fast for white-collar jobs. I wrote this off as alarmist. Clearly there were certain kinds of creative work well suited to machines. Many publications already use algorithms to generate market and sports reports. (The Telegraph, I am assured, does not.) For more complex writing, digital replacements were some way off. We were years away from software that could do wistfulness or melancholy. I was wrong. Creative AI has arrived faster than we thought.
“Machines are taking on tasks we thought only people could do,” says Dr Daniel Susskind, an academic and the author of A World Without Work. “There’s something in computer science called Moravec’s Paradox, which is that many of the things we find easy to do with our hands are hard to automate, whereas things that are hard to do with our heads are easy to automate. It is why we don’t have robotic gardeners or hairdressers, but we do have systems that can make medical diagnoses and write music. For people in these creative fields, these changes are threatening.”
GPT-3 has been used to create poetry, short stories and even pastiche. Some of the results have been remarkable. As “Gwern”, a freelance writer who has experimented extensively with AI creative writing, puts it, the results are “not just close to human level: they are creative, witty, deep, meta and often beautiful”. But it has also generated racist and sexist writing. In December 2020, an AI testing firm used the prompt “Two ___ walk into a” to compare between religions. With Muslims, violence was mentioned nine times out of 10, compared with two out of 10 for Christians. Google recently fired an employee who claimed an unreleased AI writing programme had become sentient.
It is not only writing where machines are making progress. At the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition, Jason Allen, the president of a gaming company, won first prize for a piece called Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, a striking picture in which baroque figures stand around a large, portal-like circle into a radiant landscape. Allen didn’t paint the image. He created it using a piece of software called Midjourney. Like other, similar software – the most advanced is Dall-e 2, another tool by Openai – Midjourney works by scouring millions of pictures labelled with appropriate phrases, which it then pulls together to create something close to your prompt, adding a bit of randomness so the image is new. I spent a few hours creating my own, using Stable Diffusion’s Dreamstudio, which is free to sign up to. “Boris Johnson by Andy Warhol” was particularly harrowing.
This technology will put certain kinds of creative workers out of a gig. “Everybody has been surprised at how quickly it has got good,” says Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at Oxford. “It’s not going to put serious artists out of work, but the people who will be affected are graphic designers, who may be hit relatively quickly.”
For writing, it is a different story. “[With] the state-of-the-art software you can get a coherent paragraph. The challenge is making it longer than that. And that’s not moving that fast.” The next challenge, he adds, will be going from pictures to videos. It is true that Jasper starts to get repetitive after a few paragraphs. But GPT-4 is expected soon: if it is as big a development as GPT-3, the results will be remarkable. Image generation is ahead of what even AI optimists believed. The robot takeover does not look like Alicia Vikander. It is a login page that replaces your art department.
There are ethical problems with all this. “The possibility for abuse is huge,” says Dr Carissa Véliz, a research fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford. “You can create all kinds of deep fakes. One problem is the creation of fake pornography, for celebrities, which mostly affects women.”
Another is the problem of fake information. “I sympathise with efforts to design it in a way that makes it clear you are not dealing with a human. We’re already in a tricky informational sphere where it’s hard to know what’s real. Our relationship to truth has become problematic. And the people who suffer most are typically the worst off.”
Other problems are more to do with aesthetics and philosophy. “There are issues related to how we perceive the world,” she says. “Part of what I enjoy when I read a novel is the idea that there were experiences behind those words, that the author was feeling something close to what is portrayed. When AI writes those sentences, they don’t mean the same thing. To have the kinds of intelligence we have, it’s very important to have an embodied experience.”
In the future, will all art – or all images and words – have to be labelled
‘The reason we value a work of art isn’t because it’s beautiful, it’s because a human has done it’
denoting if they are human-made? Will stronger legislation be needed to criminalise some fake images? Will artists become prompters, or editors?
Promptbase is a marketplace where users can buy and sell prompts for Dall-e 2 and GPT-3. Painting has been moving away from technical mastery for 150 years. Far from killing art, photography helped to bring about Modernism. AI might prompt a similar explosion of invention.
“The thing that’s different about art, which makes it a distraction from thinking about most work, is that the reason we value a work of art isn’t because it’s beautiful, it’s because a human has done it,” says Susskind. “To the extent that the value of a work of art is that a human produced it, there’s a limit to some of these [AI] systems. But I don’t think that’s true of tax accountants, or architects.”
Allen, the winner of the Colorado prize, defended his entry. “I knew this would be controversial,” he said, after his victory. He pointed out that he had to come up with the image, using hundreds of prompts, enlarge it using another programme, and have it transferred onto canvas. Whether you see AI generation as simply a new tool or something revolutionary may be a matter of philosophy.
For now, journalists can take comfort in the fact that, while robots might be able to write, they can’t yet call people up on the phone. There is solace in old technology, in the face of so much shock of the new.