Should I A.I.‪?‬ The Creative Shoofly Podcast

In this episode I explore Artificial Intelligence and some of the issues around artists using AI in their creative process. I hope you will enjoy hearing and thinking about these issues.
 
Links For Further Reading and Viewing
Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’
Bill Gates: The Age of AI Has Begun
IBM Technology: What are Generative AI models?
The ultimate list of AI tools for creators
How to use ChatGPT to improve your creative process
Generative AI for Makers: AI Has Truly Arrived — and It’s Here to Help You Make and Craft
Artificial Intelligence Art School Meltdown | The Looming Crisis
Eric Schmidt talks about concerns around AI
 
Links to books and websites mentioned in this podcast
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, by Jaron Lanier
You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier
Creative programming workshop with Sonic Pi
ChatGPT
DeepL Translator
Descript
Pixelmator
ProCreate
Hashtags #processing and #p5js
Some of the above are affiliate links and I may earn a small commission from them.
 
Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Creative Shoofly Podcast. I'm Thomas Beutel. In this episode, I ask myself, what do I do with all these AI tools that are becoming available? How should I use these tools in my creative process? And how do I maintain integrity as I do?
These questions might be on your mind too, and I hope that I shed at least a little bit of light on the topic.
I am recording this in March of 2023, and there's been an explosion of AI announcements. All of a sudden, AI is everywhere. Everyone seems to be talking about it, and it feels almost like it's being jammed on our throats.
Yeah, we've been using Siri and Alexa and Hey Google for years now, and we know that recommendation algorithms have been limiting what we get to see on social platforms and in places like Netflix.[00:01:00] But while those services are a form of artificial intelligence, we were quickly jaded about how mediocre and dull they were.
But the latest AIs come in the form of image generators like Stable Diffusion and chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT. And they seem lightyears ahead of those earlier tools. And scarier too.
The AI image generators in particular caused quite a stir in the art community when they were introduced in 2021. Not only were these AI tools creating an image in minutes that would take an artist hours and days to create, but the tools were trained on images found on the internet, including images that artists had posted themselves. That felt a lot like theft.
But these are clearly creative tools. And they have me thinking about creativity and the ethics involved. Can AI help me in any of my creative processes? And if they can, how should I be [00:02:00] using AI?
The recent hubbub really started when the latest version of ChatGPT was launched in November of 2022. That was ChatGPT 3.5, and people took notice of its impressive capabilities. ChatGPT gained a hundred million users in just a few months. To put that into perspective, Gmail took five years to get to a hundred million users.
In just the last few weeks, there have been a number of follow-on announcements. ChatGPT was upgraded to version four. Google announced their chatbot called Bard, and they're also integrating AI in their workspace tools.
Microsoft released Bing Chat as an alternative way to find information with Bing. They also announced that they would be including an AI tool called Copilot in their office suite, meaning that you'll be able to have AI assist you when you're creating content in Word documents [00:03:00] and PowerPoint slides, and also when you're sending emails using Outlook.
Many other companies announced that they're integrating AI generative tools into their existing products. Canva announced that they're adding AI so that you can use text to describe a design, and it'll create a Facebook cover page, a YouTube profile picture, YouTube intro and outros, In