The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Roll over Gutenberg, let Google give you the news! Amazon recently set a limit of 3 books per author on their website. 3 a day. One of our local libraries has set aside an AI-Free Zone strictly for books written by humans. I just listened to a dozen you-Tube videos of an old delta blues musician that were all written and sung by AI. Fooled me.

How long do you think it will be before most writing and most music will be AI generated? A year? A decade? You want to write a mystery novel, just pick a style, a favorite author, you can crank out an entire series, dozens , hundreds, only have to wait a day to post the next 3, means you could publish over 1000 a year.

If you think it’s easy to tell a computer generated artwork, be it poetry or novels, movies or music, think again. Even in these earliest years of Artificial Intelligence, the baby androids are really very proficient at mimicry. If you think imagination or creativity are some sort of evolutionary zenith, maybe even God-given, no way will some machine intelligence paint a Guernica or write Crime and Punishment, maybe just jingles for cereal commercials or mediocre sitcoms for Netflix … you’d be lulling yourself into optimistic complacency.

Two years ago I heard an NPR report that asked AI to write new lyrics for America the Beautiful, which it did in less than a second. The radio hosts were wowed by the speed then mocked the lyrics as second rate at best. Pardon me, but they were no worse than the originals from where I sat listening. The Delta blues songs I heard last month were great, lyrics, instruments, vocal, video. I didn’t know they weren’t human produced. My bandmates didn’t either when I sent them the links.

Most art springs from the art that precedes it. Already there are plenty of my fellow artists using AI to “assist” them in their work, you know, let the android do the tedious grunt, we’ll provide the creative spark. It won’t be long we’ll see the students surpassing us mentors. Creativity isn’t proprietary for us humans anymore. Although … I bet we will still sign our name on the canvas. Who’s gonna know the difference?