Why artists are becoming less scared of AI

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Knock, knock.

Who's there?

An AI with generic jokes. Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances. Their results were mixed.

The comedians said that the tools were useful in helping them produce an initial vomit draft" that they could iterate on, and helped them structure their routines. But the AI was not able to produce anything that was original, stimulating, or, crucially, funny. My colleague Rhiannon Williamshas the full story.

As Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University who specializes in AI and creativity, told Rhiannon, humor often relies on being surprising and incongruous. Creative writing requires its creator to deviate from the norm, whereas LLMs can only mimic it.

And that is becoming pretty clear in the way artists are approaching AI today. I've just come back from Hamburg, which hosted one of thelargest events for creatives in Europe, and the message I got from those I spoke to was that AI is too glitchy and unreliable to fully replace humans and is best used instead as a tool to augment human creativity.

Right now, we are in a moment where we are deciding how much creative power we are comfortable giving AI companies and tools. After the boom first started in 2022, when DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion first entered the scene, many artists raised concerns that AI companies were scraping their copyrighted work without consent or compensation. Tech companies argue that anything on the public internet falls under fair use, a legal doctrine that allows the reuse of copyrighted-protected material in certain circumstances. Artists, writers, image companies, and theNew York Times have filed lawsuits against these companies, and it will likely take years until we have a clear-cut answer as to who is right.

Meanwhile, the court of public opinion has shifted a lot in the past two years. Artists I have interviewed recently say they were harassed and ridiculed for protesting AI companies' data-scraping practices two years ago. Now, the general public is more aware of the harms associated with AI. In just two years, the public has gone from being blown away by AI-generated images to sharing viral social media posts about how to opt out of AI scraping-a concept that was alien to most laypeople until very recently. Companies have benefited from this shift too. Adobe has been successful in pitching itsAI offeringsas an ethical" way to use the technology without having to worry about copyright infringement.

There are also several grassroots efforts to shift the power structures of AI and give artists more agency over their data. I've written aboutNightshade, a tool created by researchers at the University of Chicago, which lets users add an invisible poison attack to their images so that they break AI models when scraped. The same team is behind Glaze, a tool that lets artists mask their personal style from AI copycats. Glaze has been integrated into Cara, a buzzy new art portfolio site and social media platform, which has seen a surge of interest from artists. Cara pitches itself as a platform for art created by people; it filters out AI-generated content. It got nearly a million new users in a few days.

This all should be reassuring news for any creative people worried that they could lose their job to a computer program. And the DeepMind study is a great example of how AI can actually behelpful for creatives. It can take on some of the boring, mundane, formulaic aspects of the creative process, but it can't replace the magic and originality that humans bring. AI models are limited to their training data and will forever only reflect the zeitgeist at the moment of their training. That gets old pretty quickly.

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