WILL AI TAKE OVER CONTENT? THE DEBATE IS TOO NUANCED FOR EVEN AI ITSELF TO SOLVE

Unless you are an early adopter of the proposed first human settlement on the Moon, your LinkedIn feed has almost certainly been swamped with an overwhelming scree of industry-disrupting intent during the past few weeks. Two letters have dominated the conversation: AI. And in an industry context, every second poster and talking head is lining up to take pot-shots at what it all means for creatives, including some particularly charmless suggestions from people you can only assume are in the midst of a fairly messy divorce from reality.

Again, for those not paying attention at the back, the catalyst was the launch of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, or ChatGPT to its virtual mates. It’s a chatbot that was sent out into the world like a particularly creepy child in November 2022 by American research and deployment company OpenAI. What followed has been nothing short of extraordinary.

The process of understanding the enormity of ChatGPT’s numbers could itself benefit from some form of artificial intelligence. The chatbot supposedly took a mere five days to hit one million users. For context, that figure was reportedly reached by Instagram in two-and-a-half months; Spotify in five months; and Facebook in 10 months. The spread is so rapid that AI is fast becoming a hoover-esque catch-all byword for ChatGPT.

In an age of internet-breaking trends and viral memes that hit millions of handsets before breakfast, it’s not unusual, of course, for such developments to be as vacuous as a black hole. Yet ChatGPT more than matches the hype: it’s a legitimately impressive innovation at the knife-sharp cutting edge of tech.

 Inevitably, given ChatGPT’s spiralling omnipresence and dizzying potential, the rate of debate has hit similarly stratospheric levels. Countless fields are about to experience the real-world consequences, with almost immediate sea-changes of a size that would ordinarily take years, if not decades. In the 1980s and 90s, we worried that AI would soon blast us back to a new Stone Age via terrifying nuclear wars (hat tip to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator franchise). In 2023, the dawning reality is rather more menial: it’s coming for our jobs.

Until now, the hive mind has almost entirely silenced naysayers going into bat for creatives – the general logic being: adapt or die, Luddites. In the rush to avoid looking technologically backwards, however, solar system-sized clouds of hot air have been gusted onto ye olde interwebs without much in the way of nuanced alternative viewpoints. In reaction to this, the idea that AI can ever truly replace human creatives needs to be debunked.

 If the pandemic taught us one thing about working environments, it’s that most human beings don’t do awfully well when separated from other members of the species for prolonged periods of time. Until AI develops a soul – a terrifying notion in itself – it cannot replace human interaction, human relations, human empathy and, crucially in this context, human judgement.

Put simply, if you give three humans a creative brief, they will each deliver varied ideas. If you ask one human to work on three outcomes to the same brief, they can present three different ideas. But in theory, if you give an AI the same brief three times, it will deliver the same idea three times. If variety is the spice of life, AI is the creative equivalent of uber-processed value-brand white bread.

Not everything that comes out the meat grinder of AI will be fit for consumption without judicious editing, either; the comedic lapses in perceptive understanding so beautifully captured in cult 1980s robot movie Short Circuit are also endemic in AI’s answers to many queries. For now, too, AI is only as good as its inputs – although it almost goes without saying that by nature it is constantly evolving, so this article will doubtless need to be revised in a matter of months to reflect said progress.

At least in the short-term, tangible effects will chiefly consist of narrowing the inspiration gap between less-skilled creatives who lack flair for ideas or writing/editing nous. One of my own LinkedIn network who works in the general PR sphere recently posted a glowing review of how ChatGPT has transformed their daily working life – detailed, without irony, in a couple of hundred words littered with painfully remedial spelling and grammar mistakes.

It’s easy to see why they might be singing AI’s praises. You can’t cure such personal-slash-professional deficiencies with AI alone. At least not yet, but the brilliant folks at OpenAI doubtless have it on their moonshot schedule already.