As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
But still we have something that a machine does not: taste, creativity, and imagination. Even before someone learns how to paint, they’re probably coming up with things they would love to be able to make in their head. That’s a reason why a lot of people start studying art in the first place: to be able to put the things in their head down to paper.
AI, so far, is still just a rough imitation of the human mind. It is fundamentally unable to come up with new, creative ideas. It does not have desires, aspirations, it does not love, it does not feel. Thanks to the power of computing, math and statistics, though, it can fool people into thinking there’s something more in the machine than just code and a huge art data set. Props to programmers for making such an awesome illusion. But it’s still just existing artwork, retrieved and remixed as ordered by a human-given prompt. It really fools people, doesn’t it? The day AI becomes self-aware and develops creativity, then maybe we can compare it to our minds.
There is absolutely no reason why these things are restricted to biological machines we have in our heads. Things like taste are results of our neural networks being tuned by evolution to prefer certain things over others. Meanwhile, machine algorithms already show lots of creativity and imagination. Computers have solved problems humans haven’t been able to solve. Here’s one example.
While current AIs are nowhere close to being as sophisticated as the human mind, they absolutely do come up with new and creative ideas. AI is currently being used by scientists to come up with proofs, fold proteins, solve equations that humans are unable to solve, and so on.
All these things are just products of evolutionary tuning. There is no indication that the way biological neural networks in our brains work is fundamentally different from the way artificial neural networks operate. Saying that it’s an illusion is unfounded. In both cases we’re dealing with a predictive network that uses prior training and experience to learn and identify patterns. What AIs currently do is implementing aspects of what the human mind does.