AI can generate images and (soon) videos from just a simple prompt, given to it by anyone. AI can write you an essay, it can do your homework, it can code your website, it can even read you a book. Certain AI services can even produce music for you from, again, just a single, vague prompt, or even sing for you.
It really is concerning, as much as exciting. Is everything we’ll enjoy in the future going to be artificially generated? Not by humans, not with human creativity and the kind of flaws that make us human in the first place, but by cold algorithms that merely aim to mimic human creativity?
What is real in the first place? What is art? You’ve surely used social media in the last couple of years, you know AI-generated images are already flooding it, and tricking millions of unsuspecting people that what’s in those “photos” actually happened, or this art was drawn by real humans… This speech was said by real humans… But no, the line is being blurred all the time.
Well, I’m an optimist, and as a creative, I choose to focus on the positives, specifically for creativity…
Here’s how AI is helping me be creative, without destroying the humanity of my art
For me, AI has been extremely useful for music production (but not in the way you might think)
So I like to do pretty much everything creative there ever was. I’ve always liked exploring arts, and among the favorites are writing books, producing music, and developing video games.
Now, with writing books, I don’t consider AI an okay thing to use, unless you desperately need it to simplify a few paragraphs and make them more concise. Small touches.
Music production, though, is my top hobby, and I think I’ve found a great middle ground in using AI, without literally making it do the entire song for me.
See, I can’t exactly afford to hire singers or rappers all the time, nor am I willing to rely, and wait on other people for what’s just a hobby, so I’ve started paying a monthly subscription fee for a voice generative AI service.
And it’s been fantastic. If I need a hook for my song, or some spoken word, I can just trial and error the voice generative AI until I get the right results, with the right inflection, tone, and voice.
So already AI is doing me a good enough job that I’m willing to tangle myself in subscription services, something I usually avoid like the plague.
Now let’s talk about game development – a monumental task for just one person, depending on the scope of the project you’re aiming for.
I’ve done a couple of simple 2D platformers, but now I want to aim high, and develop an open-world 3D game. Now that’s borderline impossible to do right alone, or was…
However, AI isn’t quite there yet, in my opinion, but give it a year or two, and we’ll have perfectly competent video and image-generating AI at our fingertips, like OpenAI’s DALL-E. It’s worth noting that DALL-E is already available as part of a subscription service; I’m just choosing to wait a bit longer, until it’s ready to generate videos for me, not just images.
Because a lot of the video game graphics I need must be animated. But also, because generative AI has a few quirks, still, and needs a bit more time to mature and get polished.
Generating images and videos aside, AI is already perfectly capable of helping with the programming aspect of game development, or any kind of coding. Now that’s been useful to me for a while – even something as simple as programming the physics and collision engine of a 2D platforming game is easier than ever, because I don’t need to code it from scratch anymore, and trial and error-ing is reduced to a minimum.
Coding nowadays can be notably less time-consuming thanks to the likes of ChatGPT
ChatGPT can get me started with a solid engine off the bat, or can check my existing one for programming errors. It’s awesome.
And while we’re on the topic of image and video generation, we can get back to my music production thing – I want to create music videos for some of my songs. Traditionally, that’s been either extremely expensive, if I choose to hire someone to do it for me, or extremely time-consuming, if I choose to do it myself.
Realistically, I just need some trippy graphics, synced to the beat. That last sentence alone is enough of a prompt for generative AI to make me the music video. Or at least theoretically it will be, in the near future.
Like any other tool, AI is what you make of it; it can be an amazing commodity, or a complete disaster, depending on how humans choose to use it
OpenAI’s ChatGPT
You’re reading this, so you’re likely a tech enthusiast, who’s already well aware of all the concerns people have about AI, and rightfully so. Everything we covered at the start of this article – it can erase the humanity of most artistic work. It can take away jobs from creative people, especially artists. It can be used to manipulate millions, if not billions of people with fake, yet believable “photos” and videos, containing real celebrities and politicians, doing or saying things they’ve never actually done or said.
But again, I choose to see the positive side of it, and it’s a big one. As a creative myself, it’s really helped me chase my hobbies easier and cheaper than ever. It’s making me believe that I could, in the near future, accomplish something I thought would be an impossible pipe dream – develop that ambitious video game I mentioned earlier.
AI will open a lot of doors for creative people, albeit it might close some too, but it’ll hopefully balance itself out.
Recently I even argued AI might help us become more present in the moment, instead of staring down at our phones all the time.
So, there’s my experience, and opinion on AI for now.
What are your thoughts on generative AI, and its potential effects on creatives, and creativity in general?