Does AI Compromise or Enhance Creativity?
The cover image was created using two creative processes: Dall-e2 AI generative image using keywords: AI creative Self Portrait, AI as an artist. Images were then downloaded as individual files, that I layered, composited & painted on top of an original graphic illustration created by my colleague Ivett Cser.
First published as a top story on Blockster.
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Hollywood tragically and repetitively misrepresents AI (artificial intelligence) as synonymous with sentience and even consciousness. While the words can build on one another, their implications are vastly different. I will cover this at depth in a follow up post on “Why is AI not a Threat to Humanity?”
The entertainment industry’s portrayal of AI is also culturally, racially, and gender skewed in favour of the western, white, male perspective, and thus lacks both dimensionality and diversity. Why does that matter? It results in gaping blind spots in insight, access and accountability that can only be accounted for by aggregating a diversity of perspectives at inception, not as an afterthought.
The lower the margin of initial bias, the less likely it will underserve, eclipse, or overlook certain demographics. Naturally, intrinsic prejudice would predispose media story arcs explored around AI, as even those developing it are stilted in their awareness of how to differentiate between intelligence, sentience, and consciousness. Eastern cultures would have a completely different take on all three words.
Lastly, the narratives tend to err on the side of dystopia, the disenfranchisement of the human race, and the onset of an era of doom and gloom brought on by machines.
While such polarized dramatization may sell tickets, it does not envisage a reality anchored in truth, as machines are just modeling their outputs based on human inputs.
That which we give rise to is only as terrifying, detached, and inconsiderate as we, ourselves, are.
What Is AI (Artificial Intelligence)?
It is a responsive set of computer algorithms (directive operational pathways for problem solving), and logic modules that emulate human cognitive processes. AI can comprehend requests and execute on instructions by following a set of rules and processes nested within a predetermined framework of coherence.
It can perform multiple tasks by exploring and extracting from as many data sources as it has been given access to and trained on, using machine learning.
Machine learning can be described as the ability of a computing system to make decisions at choice points based on importance (weight) and affinity (preference) assigned to a data input.
It relies on pattern recognition and can accurately and efficiently calculate all permutations and combinations from the finite data sets it has been modeled on to discern heuristics, develop associations, interpret connections, and predict outcomes.
AI/ML can recognize speech, forecast consequences, play games, personalize one’s shopping experience, translate, prevent fraud, generate images, produce music, create smart content, compare, contrast, condense, clarify, and interpret large volumes of information, and give rise to AI assistants, voice assistants and autonomous vehicles.
Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
Machine learning is straight forward, transparent, based on statistical probability, and relies on human inputs to know its parameters for an ask. Deep learning is a more associative, penetrative, and vigorous mode of Machine Learning. DL is complex, opaque, and leverages network intelligence to exponentially augment its learning curve and fortify its ability to solve for problems as they arise.
A neural network means the system processes information within its own construct and has at least two to three black box (hidden) layers of judgment calls (like a human mind) between an input and the final output. Deep neural Nets can have over a 100+ hidden layers, with each neural node assigned its own value of relational significance, like a human being’s brain, but it comes with the challenge of not always knowing how the learning is likely to be applied by the AI.
Deep Learning is often the starting point for horror Sci-Fi, like M3GAN, because it can be supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, self-supervised or reinforcement driven. We can get into the ethics of that in a different article, but to illustrate the basics, Machine Learning is like cooking with a recipe that creates a specific dish.
If you want to make any variations, it will require additional steps or inputs that modify the sequence. Deep Learning is freestyle cooking. A master chef freely experimenting with various ingredients to invent a new dish through trial and error to suit her/his/their palate, style, and cuisine.
ML delivers, DL discovers. ML is compliant, DL is adaptive. How does all this pertain to the humanities?
What Does AI/ML/DL Have To Do With Art, Written Word & Content Creation?
There are many Artificial Intelligence applications. To name a few, Stable Diffusion, Riffusion, Dalle, ChatGPT3, MidJourney, DeepMotion etc… I find them engaging and fun to brainstorm and concept develop on.
As a designer and creative, I find them interesting and invaluable to my creative process now, but I use them ethically and intentionally to push my own craft, not complacently and exploitatively to plagiarise.
A true creative is inspired by emergent tools and technologies and is excited to have technology streamline and expand her/his/their creative process.
S/he/they are not threatened or undermined by its presence. It’s another utilitarian tool in my belt, it does not replace me. I do not conflate its capacities with my own, and it’s not a competitive risk to me. I recognize my provenance and presence in this world is not replaceable by any other sentient, conscious human, so why would it be replaceable by a machine?
This fear stems from identifying too deeply with all that you are doing, and failing to exercise awareness around being, a state that arises only when you cease from all activity. It is important to know what you bring to the table, to shed and outsource those laborious aspects that can be easily made by a machine.
Focus instead on the value you bring to the table by virtue of being you.
People complain that corporations are ever eager to bring down costs, and thus will opt for AI as the alternative to hiring human beings. Fair, but these companies will also get what they pay for, and if they choose to show up with bottom-line as their core priority, they are not worth working for anyway.
All this tells us is that this enterprise is unethical, unsustainable, and deformed. Such brands will continue to act myopically and selfishly, regardless of the availability of AI. The larger concern is the avaricious business, not the cutting-edge technology.
Companies looking for the cheaper option will certainly pick mindlessly generated, obviously appropriated stock content over hiring someone who can produce something of value and purpose. Ultimately, it’s humans who devalue, disregard, and denigrate humans. Not an innovative implement, which is simply a tool that can be wielded for both good and bad, it is the person using the tool who determines its impact.
Let’s not blame AI for human shortcomings and greed.
Another popular complaint is about the appropriation of an artist’s work and the blatant stealing of intellectual property. AI scrapes all the images it has access to and tries to reduce the noise of the images it draws from until it can match the keywords to the pixels that remain after its process of material elimination.
Where this goes off the rails is when individuals using the interface begin to input a specific artist’s name to emulate their style. Is the AI adhering to copyright regulations and only copying 10% or less of the original, or does it not know such legal and ethical limits and boundaries? If it does have a self-regulating capacity to its expression, then the AI is not ethical, and it needs to be reined in by those in charge of its training sets.
Many are offended by AI’s extractive, reductively summative modality, stating that by virtue of how it is trained and how it adds and subtracts pixels to its generative canvas from an existing, human created, online, visual repository, it is predisposed to only producing derivatives.
Many fear that AI nefariously condones intellectual property transgressions at scale. I find the human mind is also generative and emulates the same premise, we are just better at calibrating how much of each input we infringe upon without losing credibility as an artist.
We can simultaneously alter narrative minutiae, pictorial motifs, and raw materials to varying levels of intensity to elude others from knowing how we appropriate. We vary the degree to which we breach another’s process, style, aesthetic, medium, textural inclinations, pattern repetitions, color psychology etc.
To simulate this through AI would require a lengthy essay of exceptionally eloquent, qualifying prompts. The best artists’ in the world are alluringly cryptic, their black box process is riddled in subterfuge, and what we fear is AI Deep Learning will uncover how to be as complexly deceptive as us, but only when it gets to that pathological degree of strategic duplicitousness and diplomacy can it generate what we deem “original” art.
AI image generators at present are simply not as fine-tuned as the human mind, but this is part of the technology’s learning curve. Its pain points will evolve into gain points with time, but there is no sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Read a comparative analysis of the two works here.
As seen above, renowned artists often spearheaded movements together, and had nearly indistinguishable styles, but clearly the world values both paintings immensely. I once had my original works about the poaching of elephants and rhinos copied poorly, both by a design studio in South Africa and by an incompetent young male artist in the United States, both used it publicly to raise awareness for the same issue.
I commented on each thief’s proud social media shares and highlighted that stealing from me to raise awareness about a crisis that exists only because we are stealing something (ivory) from another living animal is both hypocritical and ignorant. I got bombarded by irrational internet trolls in the wildlife conservation sphere who said it didn’t matter that the two thieves had brazenly and evidently copied my work without asking, as they were still trying to do good in the world.
I could have pursued it further, but their pathetic effort to copy my work still did not get the proportions or composition right, so I let the eyesores be. However, the Non-Profit using my images to raise awareness that had compensated me for my creativity had to litigate, to ensure that people weren’t infringing on their messaging and campaign, but if people can be takers when feigning to “give back” then why wouldn’t they push their luck on an AI generative model?
It’s laughable and hard to take such lost souls seriously. Recall how DALL-E was churning out images with poorly removed watermarks on them? That is not art, it is also not usable, and prompts used to compose the piece were sloppy at best.
Unfortunately, AI generators also allow you to submit an image and request variants of the uploaded sketch or artwork. This increases the likelihood of infringement, but these mishaps are easily preventable with checks and balances to the platform. AI should be fair and accountable to everyone, and not thrive at the expense of some.
I don’t think it helps to be super possessive and litigious. There are no great ideas that stem from nowhere. By the time someone tries to rip you off, you are already well known for your originals, and the rip off scandal will only garner greater notoriety for your work. If someone is minting NFTs of your original art without even attempting to alter it, then that is legally actionable.
However, we ought not to come down harshly against AI, or even in the way AI allows people to reference artists in the prompts, because everything expands on or evokes what has been. I am deeply inspired by Malika Favre and Noma Bar, but I do not create anything that resembles either artist’s portfolio of work.
As a creative, what is most enjoyable to me is the process. Why would I relinquish my autonomy and agency of will where it matters most onto AI or anyone else?
Creativity comes from every cell in my being, from my soul, heart, mind, and life experiences. It cannot be duplicated without diluting its integrity. The same truth holds for every artist out there.
Even before AI, artists have relied on shared principles, theories, styles, approaches, materials, and formats to produce their work. Have you read Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon? All artists look to the work done by their predecessors, mentors and contemporaries in some way or form for impetus.
Even groundbreaking art imitates life, and thus unapologetically plagiarizes the natural world. Everything borrows from and improves upon everything else, but when done well, it leads to the evolution of its building blocks, as it gives rise to something completely different not merely a subpar derivative. Homage without theft requires imaginative proficiency.
What Happens To The Average Creative Who Does Not Have The Dexterity To Set Their Talent Apart?
They experience greater competition from AI flooding the market and lose the ability to generate revenue for their skill. To put it starkly AI slaughters the skill economy. The skill economy is dead. We are headed toward a talent economy. If you are not talented, if you can’t outpace AI’s expertise and efficiency of process with the essence and embodiment of purpose, you will lose footing in the world and within self.
At Parsons School of Design, they distinguish their curricula and justify their tuition rate against FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) as follows: “If you want to be a tailor go to FIT, if you want to be a designer attend Parsons.”
Well AI is here to replicate technical ability, which renders tailors replaceable but in its current iteration it is not as non-linear, intuitive, holistic, and mindful a problem-solver, which makes designers indispensable. AI forces us to not just toil but to dig deep and figure out where our effort, energy and time is most needed and best expressed.
When I was a child, I picked up many extracurricular activities that I enjoyed and was accomplished at. My parents felt anything I had the ability to do and aptitude for was something I should monetize or make a career of. When I played the violin well; they would say, “…you should be a violinist.”
I won a few chess championships in the Under-10 age category, and they would exclaim, “oh you should train to be a Grandmaster.” I always responded with “Just because I am good at something does not mean it is the best use of my time on this planet. It is not my calling; I will not spend my life doing it as a career.”
I acknowledge this is a statement of privilege, but the hierarchy of needs prioritizes self-actualization, it does not advocate squandering your lifespan at a vocation you loathe. The era of parents coaxing children to do anything to earn a dime and attain stability at the cost of self-integrity is ending, and an era of personal agency and intentional choices is upon us.
The only way to surmount performative mediocrity is by actualizing one’s reason for being. This becomes the primary role of foundational education. There is a chasm between the two, and Al takes the choice of “coasting along with just a career” off the table. This is a prodigious advancement for society, as the gift of AI compels humanity to find deeper meaning for self and probe into the true meaning of existence.
‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.’ — Oscar Wilde.
A beautiful side-effect of AI generative-image platforms is that it enables more people to try their hand at creativity, democratizing access by lowering the bar on technical ability, making it possible for so many more people to be pictographically communicative.
In that vein, it can be used by just about anyone both recreationally and professionally. Might I recommend game night with AI? Believe me, once you play Pictionary or Drawing without Dignity with Dall-e, there is no going back.
Before I address other aspects of AI, I want to share my own creative process with you. Often, I see a vision, it comes to me as a finished composition, and my only task is to be the hand that delivers what came to me, through me. It’s like being possessed and having no choice but to enact the will that has tuned my lightning rod to its frequency.
Sometimes, it requires a lot of grunt work. In this assignment, I had to do a lot of scuts, as I did not “see” what was being asked of me. Nothing came through when I sat down and pondered the scope. There were no epiphanies.
My plan B when I encounter such a creative block is to tumble down rabbit holes of research so I can inundate my system with as many patterns, illustrations, photographs, and ideas until my being is saturated enough to be receptive to an organic epiphany.
A reputed international organization engaged my services to create an artwork in my signature style to portray planetary migrations in a glimpse. I did not think to use AI for the creative process, and I had to make several hand drawn sketches, investigate themes for hours based on references I pulled up during ideation.
Finally, it clicked into place. I had an inkling of the final work, and my juices began to flow. From that moment, it took two days for me to figure out the specific placement of all the species’ footprints and motion configurations in the aggregate layout.
Migratory Pathways by © Asher Jay, image created in 2022.
Migratory Pathways Description: The world is composed of paths walked, sprinted, swum, soared, hovered, fluttered, inched, crawled, slithered, circulated, wriggled, and twitched by living beings of all sizes and shapes, in flocks, packs, herds, communities and as individuals.
A world in motion is one that is thriving in a state of dynamic symphonic flow. Cessation to the fluid routes evolution has given rise to within this inimitable biosphere, which results in pockets of colourless stagnancy, breath and being greyed out by death and decay.
Vitality is expressed in the state of migration, for both human or wild. Migrations promote resiliency through the assimilation of diversity. The most influential, extractive, dominant force in the Anthropocene (age of man), accelerating biodiversity loss, climate change, and resulting in massive shifts in global migratory patterns for both human beings and wildlife, is the patriarchy.
The arrow’s phallic directionality overtly culminates in mankind’s oblivious footprints, paving the way forward for all organisms. The pulsating whole cannot embrace a future when only some parts are afforded the privilege of movement in the present. In a world where many are stranded, curated, confined, and restricted, the inertia of immobility results in fatalities.
To preserve the integrity of the whole means to preserve the space and pathways needed by every living system and being in toto. Perhaps something we ought to contemplate together with every step we each take, starting now.
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The message and layout proved too provocative and controversial for the client, and I was asked to pursue a different direction. I did what I normally do, spent the next two weeks consuming every sensorial input I could stumble upon, and felt called to ingest.
I even turned to Midjourney and queried some ideas, but it produced images that were not in my aesthetic and definitely not in the least bit interesting to my sensibilities. The images were surreal, fantastical, and like most other content I saw on Midjourney.
Midjourney AI generated images for the command: /imagine planet earth migratory routes taken by human beings and wildlife in search of resources from above.
This dissuaded me from exploring AI as part of my artistic method, and I turned to my usual inspiration sources: museum exhibits, art shows, coffee table books, magazine articles, as many visual representations of migrations as I could uncover in peer reviewed papers, infographic spreads and via Google, and nothing spoke to me.
Then I watched a video I shot on a coral reef, and I spotted brain coral. It immediately occurred to me to use a maze to depict routes, both organic and manmade. I figured this way it would also be representative of the human mind and collective intelligence of the natural world, and how the two are at odds.
I pitched the client; they loved the concept. I further homed in on the premise with the juxtaposition of naturally occurring patterns that referenced a maze-like brain coral with an actual mathematically accurate maze illustration using a compass and divider. All this work took me weeks of sleepless effort.
The initial iterations were flat, lackluster, lazy, and most importantly, I hated them. Having a strong reaction toward or against my work as it is in progress is part of my process. I usually experience a visceral rejection of the creation until it feels resolved and in compositional stasis.
It took countless color palettes and several tries, with various elements changed and moved around due to client feedback and my own clarity of what it needed to expound when it was finished, to result in the final composition. Problem solving in design does not occur without anguish.
Finding our way by © Asher Jay, image created in 2022.
The finished work entitled “Finding Our Way” is cosmic yet terrestrial. It has two dispersion patterns superimposed in the background, and evidences radial displacement. It alludes to the 6 degrees of climate change that will continue to escalate the need for mass migrations. It speaks to Dante’s concentric circles from Inferno, and it references the layers that comprise our biosphere’s atmosphere.
The image entails a maze created from brain coral to the right, bleeding into the man-made maze and vice versa, to show that like yin-yang, there is always hope for co-existence. I rendered the human beings and animals in different shades of green and blue, to evidence diversity.
From all that I had read on, having to leave a sense of normal or home behind, being a refugee isn’t about “looking a certain way”. The way I have shown the people is in a state of everyday activity, living a life that seems normal until that normal is taken away at a moment’s notice.
The everyday moments we take for granted — buying groceries, running, exercising, hanging with family — become memories, and the mnemonic motifs people take with them until they can reestablish that sense of routine and stability.
This work took a lot of thinking, reading, conceptualization and passion for the topic to create. I titled the world on its axis, to suggest that our worldwide needed to shift. Every aspect of this piece is intended and directionally significant. I designed it, I did not haphazardly generate it with a few word commands.
Intentionality is layered, and connections must be weighted, but also intuitive, and rich in possibilities. Staring into the image should allow a person to peel a proverbial onion, not move through a linear pipeline of an input, resulting in the obvious output. That is deeply disinteresting to a viewer.
The work also depicts how, if all geological time could be condensed into a 24-hour clock, man would only have found expression a second before midnight. Wanted to galvanize my audience to make that second count for all life on earth. Welcome to my black box of deep thinking and learning.
If an AI can do what I do, I will find better uses for my time. Until then, I will do what comes through me to help people connect to a greater biological and evolutionary sense of belonging. Sure, you could use my name in the query and generate a work that looks like mine, but it would not be original, it would not break ground, and it would be a half-baked imitation of what I could conceive next.
AI can only pull from what has been done, not what can be done. Sure, deep learning could strive for that, but we would be remiss to overlook humanity’s incredible ability, spirit, and connection to life that a machine, no matter how “alive” it thinks it is, will experience. Why? Well, this is a larger premise to explore in a separate article, but in a nutshell, we are so much more spontaneously complex, inimitably brilliant, and wonderfully unexpected than we give ourselves credit for.
After finishing the work and out of curiosity, I tried to query for the exact premise of motifs as a sequence of words on AI, to see if after an hour of iterating, I could give rise to something similar on Dall-e. I tweaked the description parameters for the request, and after an hour it churned out some pieces that were a chaotic take that resembled some ideation doodles in my notebook:
Attempt 1: planet earth migrations of people and animals, layout organised in a circle, dispersal of movement suggested outside circle, circle is filled with the earth, earth contains a maze that looks like a hybrid of brain coral and regular maze.
Attempt 2: planet earth migrations of people and wildlife depicted as silhouettes, organized in a circle, dispersal of movement suggested outside circle, circle is filled with the earth, earth contains a maze that looks like a hybrid of brain coral and a regular maze in shades of blues and emerald greens.
Attempt 3: two-dimensional art, migration of people and wildlife in silhouette, clockwise movement, migration suggested outside circle beyond the human and wildlife silhouettes as a dispersion pattern, circle is filled with the planet Earth in blue and green contour hues, the earth’s terrestrial regions contain a maze that looks like a hybrid of brain coral and a regular maze in blues and greens.
Dall-e AI generated images for the same concept as Finding Our Way created by Asher Jay.
None of these images came close to what I set out to create and ended up creating out of my imagination and will. Would someone who is adept at commands, and has the unbelievable patience to iterate endlessly on keyword combinations, generate my creation? Maybe. Is that the best use of this technology or their time? No.
I once read that when Dior wanted to hire a designer, he brought all potential applicants into the room and had them all sketch the dress he described out loud, only to end up with several versions of the dress. He had enough design variations to create a whole collection from just that one description. The description had served as a departure point, not as an end point.
Machine Learning tends to be convergent, while Deep Learning tends to be divergent.
If anything, I would bet that if you gave Deep Learning my creative process and asked it to mimic my aesthetic by training it on my portfolio, it may just generate something similar to what I would coin, but it would still lack intuitive, spiritual depth.
I also experience synesthesia. Certain image compositions made with high viscosity paint and thick delicious brush strokes are so vividly saturated that they trigger my taste buds to relish in their unique flavor combinations. I have never met a painting that I have liked enormously and not wanted to devour unapologetically.
I was once thrown out of a museum as a child for licking a painting, a Van Gogh haystack tragically does not palate half as well as I believed it would. I know a work resonates in an all-encompassing way when I begin to savour it. Would AI ever generate an image that is as luscious and sensorially intoxicating? Would it ever know how to judge a work with such interwoven awareness?
What Happens When AI Is Acknowledged & Awarded In Lieu Of An Actual Artist?
Colorado State Fair awarded Jason Allen, who created an AI generated image, the $300 cash prize award for Best Digital Art in 2022. It is unclear whether the judges knew the image was made using AI, as it was hung without a caption clarifying that, albeit Jason submitted the work saying he used Midjourney to create it.
Truth be told, it looks undoubtedly like it was produced on Midjourney. What I am more curious about is the exact criteria the judges used to give this composition the award. Many claim AI generated works should not be qualified art, as typing in keywords in the right sequence into an inquiry bar lacks skills and only requires a reasonable command of the English language.
I would argue that creativity is a complex process, and perhaps we should use this as a teaching moment, not to spurn AI and deny its expression, but rather to embrace this incident as a teaching moment to the “Art World.”
Perhaps the time has come to explicitly substantiate a work’s process with transparency, with a request for thumbnails, drafts and reasoning. Then a greater dialogue can be initiated around whether we can judge effort and time to create on AI as different from when it is produced manually, because what happens to works that are a chimera of both? Should restrict methodology?
For instance, content creator Karen X Cheng generated a female cosmonaut for the Cosmopolitan cover, and it took her hundreds of attempts over countless hours of prompt generation to refine the work to its published state. It may only take 20 seconds to generate the end result, but as you can clearly see from my own tries with Dall-e, an hour of effort still got me nowhere near what I wanted to see.
Artwork generated on Dall-E by Karen X Cheng for Cosmopolitan cover. Strangely Cosmo’s headline acknowledges Dall-E and not Karen as the creator of the work.
How Can The “Art World” Keep Pace With Technological Progress & How Does That Change The Way They Evaluate The Creative Process?
Judges need to be educated to have a more informed eye for true AI art, because an actual artist would work just as hard with keywords as s/he/they would with a paintbrush on Adobe or ProCreate. It wouldn’t matter. Artists are deeply dissatisfied with ill-conceived results and will not rest easy on doing the bare minimum.
Also, true artists would not feel satiated by just image generation, they would want to integrate it with other platform tools and produce something they are proud to place their name on. They would manually tweak the generated image at various points, scan the image as the new baseline each time, and generate variants of the layout that most resonates. It would be a product of symbiosis.
In such a context, does it matter if it is AI generated? My digital art now contains hand drawn elements that I have scanned in, and it utilizes filters and preexisting tools on digital platforms. I think mastery is just as evident, as creative indolence is apparent. If a submission that insipidly deployed Photoshop tools to produce an image won the digital award, I would question the metrics for analysis and the standards to which the competition holds a work before I question the merit of Photoshop.
Why is it any different with AI? Hopefully Adobe is working to integrate AI as part of its suite of tools. For the amount I pay each month for their subscription, it should be included and not an added benefit, but that’s neither here nor there.
Ben Moran's A muse in Warzone.
In related news, Moran created the above elaborate hand illustrated image entitled "A Muse in Warzone," for a book cover jacket. However, when they shared it to r/Art, a subreddit with 22 million members, the forum moderators banned them, as Moran was suspected of using AI-generated art, which is against r/Art’s rules.
They would not let Moran contest the claims made against the work's origins. Artists should always be given the benefit of the doubt to justify their work with reference images, in-process drafts and thumbnails. Moran did not utilize AI, but even those artists who do should be given the opportunity to disclose at what stages of the creative process it was used, and how.
What About Students Using AI To Generate Their Homework Assignments, Artworks & Essays?
Change the parameters for a grade assessment, be a more capable institution that pays teachers better, so the faculty feels more motivated to ensure students are learning, not just regurgitating, and surviving on short cuts.
Banning technology is to the detriment of students in the long haul. Introducing it with boundaries, however, is enriching.
To hold a generation back from using the tools that are part of their reality, to cater to an antiquated system, is not the answer. The backlash against ChatGPT3 from New York Schools, and the banning of its application on school premises, is ludicrous. I found it stupid enough that I wasn’t allowed to carry a calculator into quizzes and tests when I was in school.
It’s so encouraging to see that the same backwards thinking is holding the current generation short of accessing AI. Preposterous. Why are we so fearful of technology? Now it’s AI, but in the past it was calculators! It is just a facilitating device for human expression. It should neither be revered nor prohibited.
A child who defers to a technological hack because they are unwilling to learn something will not fare any better because you took the gadget or service away. Address the underlying reason why the child feels apathetic toward the material and disinclined to do the work expected.
People cheat on their tests, homework assignments, and work obligations because they 1. Do not comprehend what is expected of them 2. They find the request confusing 3. They feel ill equipped to deliver on it 4. They are competing with their peers to boost social currency 5. They lack the time to do it 6. They are not good at prioritizing their existence, lack self-integrity, and consequently elected to take the easy way out.
If it is the 6th reason, have compassion for that person as s/he/they are not properly aligned with their own self, does not have a strong sense of purpose or presence, and needs greater help. Once again, it is easy to blame the new technology, but all AI is doing is exposing how complacent, bureaucratic, incompetent, biased, dismissive, ignorant, irrational, anachronistic and counterintuitive we can be as a species, as institutions, and as individuals.
Using short cuts, hacks and systems that can reduce hours of grunt work intelligently and efficiently liberates us. It empowers humanity to use our time, energy, and consciousness to contribute to things that truly require our attention in the current day. If nothing else, it frees up lots of time to be with oneself, meditate and self-actualize so we stop contributing to the problems devastating the biosphere.
