How Not to Lose to AI

AI is a wonderful advancement for humanity, the power to process and draw conclusions from vast amounts of data in seconds is astonishingly powerful. The fact that regular people have access to this tech so early in its development is another aspect that makes me enthusiastic about the future.

I’ve also never been more buoyant about the value of human creativity, individuality, and diversity. I believe that as AI advances, hand in hand with that development will be a growing respect and appreciation for what makes the human brain so incredible. And something that cannot be, and never will be synthesized. 

Frida Kahlo

Foundational Model, LLM, and Generative AI systems are making waves across many sectors, most prominently the visual arts. The reason for this is the marketable power of making a fully rendered, photo realistic image or video appear from a simple prompt, versus an AI system making obsolete an office worker or indeed a whole team of people.

But let’s be clear, this IS what’s happening. The vast swathes of personnel cuts seen over the past few months across the business world are just a prelude of what’s to come. Anyone in a role that simply leverages time behind a computer for compensation, without the additional input of their individual creativity (artistic, business, problem solving, or otherwise) should be worried. Very worried.

Which brings us back to what makes humans unbeatable. AI as a monolith is by its nature derivative. It’s a product of its programming and the soupification (good luck making up words like that AI!) of the data that it gathers. Humans do this too of course, but in a much more chaotic, unpredictable, emotional, creative, odd, tasteful, and organic way. 

It’s already the case that AI copy has a recognizable style, devoid of quirk and humor. However high definition and detailed the photorealistic images get, there’s an uncanny valley-ness present in them all that’s just… a bit weird?

So for tasks like synthesizing and presenting correlations in vast amounts of data, finding answers to questions that have broad consensus, and creating “art” as a replacement for bad or average art, or in an application where it never would have been feasible in the first place, AI can’t be beat! And this tech will propel us into new and exciting places for decades to come.

But for anything new, truly new. Anything that needs to elicit a human emotion, AI doesn’t stand a chance. And what has historically been taken for granted, should be, and I believe will be, put on a pedestal.