AI is Making Everyone a Storyteller
The Empowerment and Replacement of Artists Looks Eerily Similar
Exponential Growth of AI
Artificial Intelligence has been making waves in society for a good 10–20 years now as research and products have been released but the progress in the last couple of years has been astounding. It’s at the point where, if we consider the context of all human history, we’re essentially creating unimaginable miracles every single day.
Google Search Trends for Artificial Intelligence/AI
This is fascinating because a lot of the large tech companies dominating today have been around for at least a couple of decades and have had advanced machine learning and AI solutions embedded in their businesses — so why the dramatic rise in the last couple of years?
When the community was theorizing the advancement of AI into society, we assumed that the evolution would go as such, based on difficulty and demand:
Physical → Low Cognitive → High Cognitive → Creative
We assumed that the first, widely accepted, and valuable AI-driven products would start with augmenting manual labor jobs; then go for the repetitive, mundane work; then the complex, critical thinking work; and the last frontier would be the creative arts. Ironically, as Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI states, we’ve gone in nearly the exact opposite direction.
In the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in AI-driven creative products take the industry by storm. The seminal GPT-3 released in 2020 caught nearly everyone’s attention by being able to write never-before-read Shakespeare, generate code, design an app layout or build a website, play games like Chess, write new philosophy, and more all from natural language prompts from consumers. DALL-E released in 2021 was a modified version of GPT-3 that created never-before-seen images just based on natural language prompts and already has a second version out that was released in 2022.
Just those two AI systems had a massive impact on the technology and art community (positive and negative) and they both came from one organization — OpenAI. In the last 5 or so years, Generative AI made from GANs and Diffusion Models has been consuming the minds of top AI researchers and the general public alike. Conversations about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) ran even more rampant and concerns about AI replacing people felt all the more real. In fact, this revolution has spawned so many new startups that Sequoia Capital created a Generative AI Market Map highlighting 50+ startups by their creative domains.
From an AI artwork selling for nearly half a million at Christie’s to Jasper AI being one of the fastest to reach unicorn status with a $1.5B valuation, it’s undeniable that this isn’t just a fad or a trend — AI is finding more spaces to conquer in our society. With this, there’s been a natural fear that we are going to get replaced. As a builder and artist, I hope to provide some optimism about how our AI-assisted future may look.
Rise of the Narrative Layer
Even before we started seeing Generative AI models take the world by storm, tools like Tableau implemented a Natural Language layer called AskData that made it easier to analyze data and create data visualizations just from text prompts. It felt more like a “cool” feature at the time, but now it seems to be working so well and fast that it’s clear we’re headed there for a number of industries.
What we likely will see in the coming years is exactly what Jasper AI has proved — we’re becoming storytellers. Jasper AI is building a text layer that creates media (image, text, video) within seconds of you descriptively writing it. This has prompted Jasper AI to reach a $1.5B valuation as one of the fastest-growing startups ever with a really promising product.
Writing text to create captivating art has naturally created artists to be quite concerned for a number of reasons. The first is that there’s a fear that they’ll get replaced by anyone who can just run text prompts at a fraction of the cost that it would take to employ them. The second is the legal considerations of using publically available art created by artists in datasets without asking for permission or attributing credit (in any way).
I’ll cover the issues with legal considerations in a different story as it really is a world of its own. With that being said, privacy and ownership concerns are incredibly relevant here. The advanced AI models that are going to be highly assistive are not created in a silo — they are trained on artists' work largely without their knowledge or permission.
We’re entering into an era where the boundary of being an artist or creator is lowering dramatically. In fact, AI is causing the barrier to creating art, a practice that was once reserved for the high social elites, to be nearly non-existent.
As for the fear of replacement, this is simply an evolution of art forms. Yes, we may lose certain artistic practices as it fades into history but that has happened with each new innovation. The invention of DSLRs made Film cameras a lot less popular, but they’re both still around and serve their own purpose. Similarly, AI is the latest technology that artists should look to add to their toolbelt. The argument for replacement is a false one because, contrary to dramatic science fiction literature, these AI models are not sentient and do not have a conscious. There is no intention, desire, imagination, or humanistic traits embedded in these AI art models, they’re highly intelligent pattern matches trained on a large corpus of human-generated content. Anyone trying to sell you a counter-narrative is either not fully educated about AI or attempting to sell snake oil counting on your interest in sci-fi literature.
We’re entering into an era where the boundary of being an artist or creator is lowering dramatically. In fact, AI is causing the barrier to creating art, a practice that was once reserved for the high social elites, to be nearly non-existent. If you’re able to understand and write the language, you too can be an artist and I’d argue it is the best time for you to become one. The fear of specialists being rendered obsolete is a non-starter because the very nature of you being a specialist should guarantee your ability to find a place for a new artistic method in your skillset.
What would once have taken a very long time to create and edit media can be done with a certain set of phrases dramatically reducing your time in operating tools and increasing the focus on your story. The intent behind your art, the message conveyed through your art, and the actions and emotions empowered because of your art are the focus of conversation when the difficulty in operating tools is reduced to nearly zero.
Although I’m a techno-optimist, I don’t mean to claim that this AI art revolution is meant to be considered objectively positive. We did briefly mention the commonly discussed issue of the legalities of AI, but I fear there’s another large silent issue with this revolution. Artists today often share many experiences of being either completely undervalued or not valued at all by clients even when the work they do is highly technical, creative, time-consuming, and complex. Clients often reduce their craft and skill down to “clicking a button” to the point that being undervalued as an artist is more the norm experience than not. This is likely to only get worse as clients feel they can get the same quality of work (or “better”) by just typing what they want in a search bar, inevitably forcing artists to rethink their business strategy for a sustainable career.
The AI explosion has given us this sense that we’ve been doing it for a long time when in reality we’re seeming to invent miracles each day in this space. Legislation and societal guidelines are going to take some time to catch up and all the while, we’ll have to figure out how an AI-empowered life looks. There are numerous pros and cons that have been theorized and stated in media, but I do believe that AI will cause each of us to go deeper into our innate, humanistic storytelling capacities. Yuval Harari showcased in Sapiens that storytelling is the defining feature that has differentiated us consistently over time. I believe AI will allow us to practice what we’re best at while achieving never-before-seen heights in human history.
Emphasis on Asking the Right Question
As I’m writing this, I have used ChatGPT endlessly in the last few days. It has taken the world by storm in a way that feels as electric as the release of the iPhone. We’re been seeing this transformation happening over time, but the release of ChatGPT has shown us how fast technology has changed our world. We are quickly coming to, or already at, the stage where asking better questions has become far more valuable than having all the answers.
When the world’s information is at your fingertips, it’s more valuable to be one who can retrieve the right information as fast as possible instead of being someone who memorizes everything they hear. ChatGPT deserves a story all on itself, but what I’ll say for now is that we should think about what the world looks like when there’s domain-specific ChatGPTs out in the world. Imagine if there was a retail-focused ChatGPT (or even company-specific) where you got high signal answers that were more in depth in a vertical instead of cutting “just barely” in any domain.
Knowledge workers will likely have added responsibilities to make sure they’re creating quality data to continuously feed and train their AI system so the narrative work on the other end becomes far better. I personally don’t see “Prompt Engineer” as a job coming, but just the expectation to be put on every knowledge worker to be better at asking questions to their AI system.
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