Freelance artist Nancy Aguilar feels threatened by the emergence of creative artificial intelligence programs that are affecting the livelihoods of people in her industry. Katelyn Chang, a college student and aspiring writer, also feels threatened. In collaboration with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Youth Leadership Institute, where they are fellows, Aguilar, 21, and Chang, 19, explore the controversial relationship between human creativity and AI in a new podcast series called “The Creative Code.” Explain in detail.
Aguilar, based in Fresno, Calif., and Chang, based in the Bay Area, say creators have already seen serious economic damage from the use of creative AI. They have found case after case of copyright infringement, sometimes resulting in lawsuits, after a year of researching the subject.
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Aguilar frames the problem this way: Generative AI chatbots are competing with human creations for work. Chang said he never imagined a search prompt in 2022 “using generative AI to create a deep AI-generated image that can compete with legendary artists”. “This is our reality today,” he said.
“People these days can't even tell the difference between human art and art made by AI,” Aguilar said. Artists fear that creative AI will replace them and “take away the opportunity.”
In Chang's words, generative AI is “a type of computer program designed to create new things based on tons of data it's seen before.” Generative AI can create new images, text and other data that look like the examples it has “learned” from. Some generative AI programs used for images include MidJourney and OpenAI's DALL-E.
Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, said the pair's concerns as expressed in the podcast are justified. He said that young creatives are turning away from art as a profession because they are worried that there will be no jobs for them in the future. Creative AI is a major reason art college enrollment is low nationwide, Zhao said.
Last year, DreamWorks Animation founder and chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg said the use of generative AI in the process would reduce the cost of an animated film by 90 percent. He added that within a few years it will take less than 10 percent the number of artists needed to make an animated film than it did a few decades ago, when DreamWorks abandoned traditional animation.
The use of AI in scriptwriting was a major issue in the recent Writers Guild of America strike.
Illustration by Nancy Aguilar for the premiere episode of “The Creative Code” podcast.
In the podcast, the two cited several examples of such copyright infringement by creators, including one by a Los Angeles artist who openly questioned on social media that Why is his work being posted on software giant Adobe's website without his consent?
Another example is a legal dispute involving actress Scarlett Johansson. She said in May that a new OpenAI chatbot voice released called Sky was “eerily similar” to her own voice. In a statement, the actress recounted how the company's CEO, Sam Altman, asked her last fall if she could be the voice for the firm's ChatGPT 4.0 program. Johansen said he declined the offer. Since Skye was released under such circumstances, the actress said she had to hire lawyers to ask about the voice that sounded too much to remove her voice.
OpenAI blocked Sky's use, and SAG-AFTRA supported Johansson's action.
OpenAI did not respond to Johansson's request for comment on the proceedings.
For the podcast, Aguilar and Chang ran an AI survey and were able to solicit responses from more than 100 creators between the ages of 16 and 22. He asked what young creators thought about creative AI and the future through their networks and social media. Some of the survey responses are sprinkled throughout the podcast series.
Some of the survey respondents explained how the human creative process was so different than that of creative AI. A professional artist who works with Hollywood film studios said that when he works on a painting, he goes through a “journey” with all kinds of emotions.
And for many artists that creative process itself is important — often a process of self-healing and one that's absolutely necessary in their lives, a key point missing from the AI conversation, the pair said.
Maria Schindler, communications director for the Youth Leadership Institute, said the organization helps youth in communities of color find their voice and helps them develop a social justice lens. For the podcast, Aguilar and Chang are getting additional guidance from a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.
At the beginning of the project, Aguilar envisioned using his series to demonstrate how detrimental AI has become to creators. Instead, Aguilar said she sees the benefits of the technology, such as how AI is “faster and more efficient” to produce. Artists have used creative AI to mock up something in 3D to see what they have in mind, and this is one way AI helps artists, he said. The drawback of creative AI, he said, is that it is “based on stolen data”.
Being informed and taking action in response to future developments in generative AI is key to navigating and coexisting with the technology, Chang said.
The four-part podcast series is available here.
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