by Russell Harrison
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We’ve all heard the warnings about Artificial Intelligence – it’ll conquer everything, it’s the death of creativity, or at the very least, it’ll take all our jobs. All of these ideas are probably overblown, at least in the short term. But I don’t find them to be wholly unrealistic, either. Technology has a funny way of taking our predictions and expectations and twisting them into previously unimaginable futures – for better or for worse. The whole thing is more akin to a genie out of a bottle than it is to Pandora’s Box. This might be the end of the world as we know it, but look around – are we so proud of this mess we’ve made for ourselves that we can’t even be bothered to consider the possibility of something better?
For just a moment, consider it. Set aside your political and economic views and think about the way you choose to define the human experience. Are we at our most human when we work and create out of necessity, in pursuit of profit? Or when we make things out of love, or curiosity, or even just for the sake of making? I think most of us would agree that it’s the latter option. Art and utility are not mutually exclusive – not by a long shot – but the complete and utter freedom of creating something for no real reason other than to bring it into existence is perhaps the purest expression of art and humanity. It is just as much the handprint in the cave as it is the doodles in the margin of the textbook, or the haphazard off-key melody hummed in the shower.
Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate these things. The algorithms that define an A.I. model vary, but they all share one common mission: to produce an end product that is as close as possible to perfection. What is perfection? Certainly not anything objective, at least not when it comes to writing or drawing or any other form of art. So the models use a shorthand – they rely on what is considered to be substantially good by as many perspectives as possible. In other words, A.I. is bound by its own training to the laws of mass appeal.
Let’s take a quick detour into the world of film to see how this idea might intersect with modern creativity. As of 2024, twelve out of the twenty highest-grossing movies of all time are direct sequels to existing films. Almost all of the remaining eight are adaptations of existing stories and characters, such as those appearing in comic books – or in the case of The Lion King (2019), a full remake of a 1994 film which itself is based loosely on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I don’t raise these examples as a means of disparaging any sequel or adapted work, but rather to illustrate the degree to which originality does not seem to have much to do with the financial success of any given film. Modern mass media strategically maximizes its appeal, often by taking very few risks and being as unprovocative as possible. The end product is entertaining, but rarely amounts to anything special. It exists for profit. There’s nothing dreadfully wrong with that, and this sort of media is nothing new. But film and other artistic mediums are capable of so much more.
Paralleling the work of those corporate box-office juggernauts, Artificial Intelligence is capable of producing art, broadly defined. It can observe what human artists have made, learn what people enjoy, and understand what lots of people want to see. It can even be used to make profitable art; the kind of thing that sells well because it can be marketed to almost everyone, and isn’t likely to upset anyone. It can aggregate all of humanity into a single set of preferences and aim to satisfy those preferences. In short, A.I. can do just about everything we’ve gotten used to seeing mass media conglomerates do. Still, between the corporation and the computer, neither can pull off the self-expression of a human artist; after all, they have no self to express.
We cannot expect the next great movement of individual creativity and art to emerge from a boardroom, of course. But what about those great centers of human invention, the shining beacons of imagined futures that are our communities of higher education? Students have been using A.I. to write for quite some time now – about two years, if you use the introduction of ChatGPT as a marker. Across that period, a central debate has emerged surrounding the topic. Should students avoid using A.I. because it substitutes traditional learning for a potentially unreliable technological crutch? Or should they openly engage with the technology, given that one of the purposes of education is to develop skills that will aid them in the future? I don’t pretend to have any definitive answer to these questions, but maybe we can understand them better by considering the sorts of things that students are actually using ChatGPT for.
If you’ve worked with a writer who relied on A.I. tools to churn out their draft, you know how it tends to read. The voice is stiff, imbued with roughly the same amount of personality as a fluorescent tube light. In spite of this, these essays are often fairly successful in their efforts to check all of the boxes for a given assignment. They don’t do much else, mind you – but the creators of ChatGPT and other A.I. tools deserve credit for designing a genuinely superb box-checking machine.
Is that all we expect of our students? Of course not. But the prevalence of assignments which are little more than exercises in box-checking is a real issue. At risk of overextending the metaphor, I’ll leave it here:
If you want to take a principled stance against academic usage of the box-checking machine, you first need to find a way to stop flooding academia with checkboxes.
I believe writing is art, and I believe art is defined by more than its lowest common denominator of mass appeal. Creation is an act of self-expression; people leave traces of themselves in everything they make. Those traces can take all sorts of forms – an essay about a mundane topic written with so much unabated passion that it begs you to keep reading, if only to learn more about the sort of person that could possibly care enough to write it. A story about loss that can’t settle on its own tone, as if its creator came to terms with their own personal grief while telling it. An unusually maternal older sibling character that serves as an accidental reflection of the author’s childhood family life. These are all imperfections to some degree, but their presence imbues works of art with a critical human component. It is seeing an ancient handprint and realizing with equal parts horror and wonder that your hand makes the same print.
A.I. is already beginning to permeate the artistic side of mass media, and it will almost certainly move into roles previously held by humans. The whole ordeal will be messy and contentious. At the end of the day though, the only real change will be swapping out people that are treated like machines with a machine that will be treated as it is. What of those poor artists, then, who dreamed of creating their own worlds but ended up as a cog in a system designed to churn out mediocrity, then got spat out as soon as a replacement came along? Well, they can do something that no corporation or computer ever can. They can stick their hand in the mud and leave that mark on whatever they want, and it’ll look an awful lot like my hand and your hand and every other hand out there. Except, since it’s their hand, it’ll be just a little bit different.
About the Author
Russell Harrison is a fourth-year Political Science major at The Pennsylvania State University, and will graduate in the Fall of 2024 with a minor in Engineering Leadership & Development. He has been an English writing tutor with the Writing Center @ Penn State Learning since the Spring of 2022 and has served as a Public Writing Initiative Student Fellow for much of that time. Russell advocates for the development of responsible and forward-thinking A.I. usage policies at Penn State, at times working in an advisory role with the University’s A.I. Working Group and leading workshops to promote informed decision-making surrounding A.I. for tutors and students. In his free time, Russell enjoys listening to his collection of vinyl records, tinkering around with (and frequently breaking) electronics, and riding rollercoasters.