'Assimilate or Die': Artificial Intelligence is Here; Learn to Use It

My Facebook feed is filled with my friends posting their Lensa AI selfie images, DALL·E composites from prompts, and the first pages of AI-generated scripts. There are AI music generators for people with no music skills looking to get royalty-free music for their AI-generated videos, and even John Oliver recently did a special on AI-generated art that goes down a rabbit hole of him and cabbage.

While the technology is far from perfect at this time, it does provide insight into what the future of AI art is going to look like, and how easily accessible it will be for the average layperson to create realistic and high-quality writing, video, music, and graphic arts using a few words as a prompt. When I watched a TikTok video by user and English educator Gibson is the name! this morning, I had three things I took away from this video.

AI is Imperfect

The first thing I took away, as mentioned, is that this technology is still in the experimental phase. As such, we still need human intervention with critical thinking skills and a trained skill set to be able to take what is initially generated by the AI and make it usable. Especially if this will be employed for professional strategic communication needs. However, AI technology is advancing quickly, so it is important that strategic communicators get ahead of the technology before it makes us obsolete. Which leads to the second thing I took away from this:

"What is Invented Cannot be Un-Invented"

Technology moves forward like a river. You cannot stop it once it is there. You can put up barriers, but these barriers will either pool the technology to become stronger where it is or find a way around the barrier. When we look at this history of warfare, we see that every time someone makes a better weapon, the adversary makes a better shield. In a world where disinformation and misinformation are used against us as a weapon, we can see that our adversaries will use AI-generated communication as both a weapon and a shield. Again, this means we need to be able to implement this into our own arsenal of communication tools to maintain well-trained and critical-thinking strategic communicators in both national defense and corporate industry.

Adapt and Overcome

As strategic communicators, we need to understand how AI technology works and how it doesn't work. Just like when we use spell check, not every computer-aided recommendation is correct. There is an art to using the science of technology to make it communicate your intended message. As much as this technology will improve, we still need the human element to add that je ne sais quoi. The flair that makes the human connection. As such, we need to learn the technology and implement it into our skill sets, just as we have done with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, the radio, and the internet.

"We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment." - Rudolf Steiner

A good captain knows how far to take his or her ship. They know the equipment. They know the crew. They know the written limits and the true limits. And they will test both the ship and crew to make sure they are trained and ready for the unknown. As strategic communicators, we need to take the helm of this technology and push it to its limits. If we don't, we will become irrelevant in both defense and business. How are you going to implement AI art into your communication toolbox?