Dick Pountain /Idealog 361/ 08 Aug 2024 01:04
Who’d have thought that AI could become so boring so quickly? I feel a rather urgent obligation to devote a column to what’s been happening, but it appears to be happening faster than I can type. Last month NVidia’s stock rose faster, and then fell faster than a SpaceX test shot. Then Amazon reports that its Kindle self-publishing platform has been flooded by such a torrent of AI-generated bodice-rippers that it’s having to impose a limit of only three books a day on its customers.
Because Amazon stops short of banning AI-generated content altogether, ChatGPT is rapidly becoming a cancer on the body of the publishing industry in more ways than just crap e-novels. When I’m reviewing a book I often look online at other people’s reviews, not to plagiarise them but to see other opinions. Recently though I’ve witnessed spammers using ChatGPT to spatter the net with worthless AI-generated paraphrases and summaries of best-selling real books, which make it almost impossible to find any proper critiques. And it’s not only words. The hand-crafted goods site Etsy recently told The Atlantic Magazine that it’s being swamped by AI-generated tee-shirts, mugs and other merchandise which employ ChatGPT to optimise their Google search rankings and crowd out real producers.
In a previous column I was worried about abuse of AI deep-faked photographs to compromise political opponents, but that’s turned out to have been somewhat wide of the mark because it requires a certain political seriousness on the part of the perpetrators. What’s happened instead is that Midjourney and its ilk are now enablers of pure fantasy and pop-surrealism. They allow everyone and anyone to produce memes and professional looking posters that make merely spray-painting slogans on a wall feel like something from a previous century.
When I first tried out Stable Diffusion a year or so ago I was amused by the way its limitations generated such hilariously surreal images, but I’m not laughing now. The recent UK wave of far-right activity against immigrants and asylum seekers has been organised online via Telegraph, The-Platform-Which-Used-To-Be-Called-Twitter, TikTok and other social media, and an important part of this rallying process is a new genre of surreal nationalistic propaganda memes. Popular content components of such productions are squadrons of Spitfires, St George Cross flags, knight-crusader figures in mediaeval armour and British Lions (often wearing tee-shirts but no trousers and playing cricket), all meant as symbols of that old Britain they believe has been stolen from us. GenAI tools enable them to churn out infinite combinations of these icons in glorious Marvel-comic colour and for minimal effort. It’s worse still in the USA where these same tools are being used to depict Donald Trump with a six-pack and Hulk-like musculature, occasionally with the golden wings of an archangel and a blazing sword. Visual satire has a long history from Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Gillray, to Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and Ralph Steadman, but it always required a graphical skill that has now been entirely eliminated, and the purpose is no longer satire but adulation.
It feels as though we’re currently in the ‘phony war’ phase of a marathon battle between states and AI companies over regulation of the internet. The AI side continues to bluster about transforming the world’s economy with soon-to-be invented AGI, while also admitting that it will need to use about half of the world’s electricity supply to do so (and investing in fusion research). The state was until very recently clueless about the threat posed by widely available generative AI tools – though the wave of violence in the UK seems to have awakened them smartly – and they’re also quite chary about imposing content regulation, over quite legitimate concerns about freedom of speech. The owners of online content – publishers, television and film companies – form a third force standing on the sidelines watching the impending battle. They’re furious that the AI companies have already scraped a sizable chunk of their properties without payment, but also acutely aware that there might be a profit opportunity here somewhere (who wouldn’t like robot authors and actors that you don’t need to pay?).
As for us poor authors, artists, actors and other creators we can only just watch aghast, while some members of the general public perhaps see possibilities to gain quick entrance to the so-called creative world without the bother of arduously learning a skill (hence all those Amazon three-a-day novels). How this will all pan out is beyond anyone’s (even GPT 4.5’s) ability to predict. Too many variables, like who becomes US president in November, and too many hero/villains like Trump, Musk and Altman with hidden and volatile agendas. My guess is that the stock market might just call a halt to hostilities, and quite soon…
[Dick Pountain only uses ChatGPT as a party-trick to horrify arty friends]
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