Back in 2022, when ChatGPT arrived, I was part of the first wave of users. Delighted but also a little uncertain what to do with it, I asked the system to generate all kinds of random things. A song about George Floyd in the style of Bob Dylan. A menu for a vegetarian dinner party. A briefing paper about alternative shipping technologies. The quality of what it produced was variable, but it made clear something that is even more apparent now than it was then.
Over the coming years and decades, AI will transform every aspect of our lives. But we are also at an inflection point for those of us who make our living with words, and indeed anybody in the creative arts. Whether you're a writer, an actor, a singer, a film-maker, a painter or a photographer, a machine can now do what you do, instantly and for a fraction of the cost.
Faced with the idea of machines that can do everything that human beings can do, some have just given up. Lee Sedol, the Go Grandmaster who was defeated by DeepMind's AlphaGo system in 2016 retired on the spot, declaring AlphaGo was an entity that couldn't be beaten, and that his entire world was collapsing.
In the words of Nick Cave: Songs arise out of suffering - the complex, internal human struggle of creation - [but] algorithms don't feel. Data doesn't suffer. What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognisable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has.
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