My AI experiment - did it change my mind?

Generally hostile to AI hype, would a few experiments with AI art woo me? Also, the Luddites deserve more balanced coverage.

Seasons Greetings to all of you and all my best wishes for the New Year. It is marvellous to have my children coming home, a quiet week or so. And continuing with The Novel. I’ll be trying to get a thoughtful change of year piece to you in a week or so.

Why experiment with AI?

In preparing a newsletter or other marketing stuff, I have limited design skills and no budget.

Visuals matter but there are lots of good free photo libraries of works uploaded by the artist to promote their work.

However, what I need is often not available, I can make limited collages but not draw myself. And sometimes what I need to get the vibe of a work has to be bespoke.

Artists deserve to be paid what their work is worth, and if I can’t afford that, I won’t steal. If I was rich, I would cheerfully commission an artist. (Right now, I can trade MS reading or baking or something.) But I’d need someone fast and good and with the right style.

Faced with this, I did an experiment with AI art. Know thine enemy.

I need a colour picture of racially diverse students in a 1950s US setting (ish). Colour photos with diversity are extremely rare in free 50s photographs. How good was it?

I used three different programmes, using free introductory credits, and this is one of the best result, if not the most diverse. There is a skill to recasting the prompt and ideally some skill I don’t have to edit the results. (Removing extra heads, etc).

At one level it’s a success of sorts. The era and vibe is pleasant, if you just pass your eye over it. I deliberately used it small. I had to remove the name CIINEMA SC CHOOL. One boy’s hand is weird, but you need to look. Maybe for a newsletter that’s enough.

On the other six fingered AI hand, we have several striking issues.

There is a blandness and uniformity. Of any five students, three or four look related – some were twins. There’s a tendency to be the same height and clearly clothes shopping at the same store. Positioning is passive and unimaginative. My characters vary in height colour and type… sporty, serious, nerd, theatre kids. Real effort is needed to get the diversity I want.

They are quite good at faces, since human art and photography is great at getting that right. Hands are a known issue but some spat out the odd horrific mashed faces and legs. One girl had a hand holding a large book growing from her thigh. The machine doesn’t understand shadows (because it doesn’t understand anything.) Or clothes – ties and headbands for example - or gender.

It will disobey firm instructions. Obviously some users try many times, a Darwinian approach.

I also tried some Halloween pictures to show ‘Different Genres’. Here the main issue was the program being dim about clear instructions. A couple of outputs would do.

• Ignoring the theft

• Ignoring the threat to art as a human purpose

If you want something generic, it might do.

The reality is, my novella is set somewhere a little unusual and only a human artist could patiently take my brief. For which they deserve to be paid.

I’m not prepared in general to go down this route, just as I hope artists don’t use AI to write their stories.

But it’s abundantly clear, if you want to produce art of something vaguely human to some very specific prompt, on an industrial scale, AI is the answer to your prayers. It must be great for those marketing to a fetish.

My position on AI

1.      LLMs are not intelligent, let alone sentient. They are complicated autocorrect devices.

2.      They are being monstrously hyped by people who were utterly untrustworthy in recent decades, who openly declared their aim to ‘move fast and break things’. The techbro class is fond of proposing something far more expensive and rather less useful than what is already around.

3.      The Big AI business model relies on hype as they burn through investors’ money.

4.      Where used in writing, art etc AI is being trained on copyrighted material usually without legal consent and without paying the artist. Indeed, Big AI are firm - paying the artist anything at all would render them uneconomic.

5.     Worried by disinformation? It’s dangerously bad. An AI asked to write about using AI to write a novel produced an article quoting a real named author as saying ‘he could not have written his book without it.’ He hadn’t written a book of that name, hadn’t been asked his opinion, and that’s the opposite of his opinion. Lawyer’s briefs making up and misrepresenting cases.

6.      Every use of AI is presented as inevitable, although many things are invented and then regulated to cautious use only, or banned. Human cloning, or the private ownership of nerve gas, for example.

7.      AI is not more objective, but it is very useful to claim that it is. Anyone who has followed computers won’t be surprised to learn that they faithfully reproduce the prejudices in the human data.  Facial recognition works badly with black faces, this is easily curable by training on many much more diverse photos.  Big AI can’t be bothered to do this.

8.      Regulation will come.  So, Big AI is choosing to scream “beware of the killer robots” because the real danger is not, killer robots will become sentient, but that humans will develop killer robots and direct them to kill other humans for greed or hatred.

9.      There are many individuals and research groups informed on ethics, history, culture, and society with a complex and lively debate around all this – and they are excluded from the industry’s ‘ethics’ functions.  Biotech for all its problems involved civil society from the beginning – assisted by multiple systems of regulation already in place for medicine which made it necessary. Big AI is sacking its ethicists.

10.   All societies have art. Making art is human, Give a society more leisure, you get more art. Why on earth would we hand over the glory of human creativity to a machine? Automation to get rid of jobs people find unfulfilling or exhausting could be, handled well, a positive. Automation used to make good jobs more difficult and bad jobs less pleasant is a big leap backwards. Automation can give us machine overseers to make us perform.

11. It’s never been more of a struggle to live as a writer or artist and we’re going to make this far more difficult. One writer already reports being asked to get 40% of the free for rewriting an AI draft - probably about the same work as doing it yourself.

A note on the Luddites

Luddites wanted to feed their families. They did not want to lose skilled jobs. There was no robust safety net, no free education. The factory owners operated cartels to fix wages. The Luddites could not vote and Parliament was entirely dominated by rich interests. (The odd rich lefty like Lord Byron notwithstanding.) Striking was illegal and crushed by armed force. Juries were men of property frightened by the mob. The media largely followed the money.  What exactly would you have done in this position?

Some resorted to violence, the last voice of the unheard.