Generative artificial intelligence is the next wave of the digital revolution, if we are to believe the soothsayers of Silicon Valley.
Most of us are familiar with common-or-garden artificial intelligence – when machines figure stuff out for themselves, usually by processing enormous amounts of data at a speed no human can match.One practical application is Facebook’s surveillance software combing through your personal information to try to sell you the oven gloves you bought last week.
The thing about this form of AI is that it’s basically a glorified calculator. It can’t make the creative leaps that are a feature of human intelligence.
That’s why generative AI is exciting. It can process all our lovely data and remix it into pictures, songs, poems, novels, programmes, articles and videos that appear to be brand-new.
Take OpenAI’s Dall-E program. You type in whatever you want into a text box and the computer will come up with four convincing pictures of it for you. Say, ‘Manhattan skyline as painted by J M W Turner’. Or ‘A boat that looks like Homer Simpson’. Or ‘Three hagfish devouring Donald J Trump.’
Actually, you can’t do that last one: Dall-E comes with a few in-built ‘guardrails’ – no sex, no violence, no celebrities – to prevent abuse. However, there are plenty of rivals that aren’t as worried about ethical niceties.
People are already using one of them, Stable Diffusion (whose parent company was recently valued at $100 million), to make AI porn. The era of explicit videos starring whomever you please isn’t far away.
In the meantime, those videos are prone to eerie glitches and limbs sprouting in weird places. Dall-E is great at creating Muppet memes but isn’t so good at human faces. Its musical equivalent, Jukebox, can do a passable Abba pastiche – at least until the vocals come in.
But the quality is improving all the time. This summer, a digital artist named Jason Allen won first prize at the Colorado State Art Fair with an image he created using the programme Midjourney. It prompted a lively online debate about whether computers can, indeed, create art.
I recently put this question to a philosopher of aesthetics. His answer was ‘Yes. But only bad, derivative art.’ Which needn’t be a problem, the professor reasoned. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with bad, derivative art.Richard Godwin
