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My cousin gave a wonderful speech for his father\u2019s 60th birthday party last month. It had everything you would want from such a tribute \u2014 emotion, wit, sincerity, revelation. There I was, very much enjoying sitting back listening to it, chuckling at the just-embarrassing-enough jokes and sipping on my champagne self-restrainedly so the glass wasn\u2019t totally empty by the time we got to the toast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But suddenly an unpleasant, dispiriting feeling washed over me that sucked much of the joy out of my experience. Wasn\u2019t it all a bit too perfect? Where did my young cousin learn how to write a speech like that? Had he had some artificially generated assistance?\u00a0<\/p>\n
I walked up to him afterwards and the words burst out of me before I had the chance to check my manners. \u201cBrilliant speech,\u201d I said. \u201cDid you get some help from ChatGPT?\u201d<\/p>\n
I was apparently the third person to ask him the question, and he seemed to take it as a compliment. He assured me that he had thought the whole thing up himself, and I believed him. But I would be willing to put money on another well-received speech I witnessed recently being heavily assisted by artificial intelligence. Even if I\u2019m wrong, the very fact that the thought occurred to me on both occasions greatly diminished my enjoyment.<\/p>\n
Such examples are of course only the tip of the AI-ceberg (yes, ChatGPT could have done better than that). Will I ever again laugh quite so heartily at a comedian when I don\u2019t know whether some of their jokes are artificially authored? Will I manage to feel quite such wonder at the lyrical genius of a rapper? Will I coo over a writer\u2019s mastery of language with the same admiration? What about a nice message from a friend or even a letter from a lover \u2014 how can I know these words originated in their heart and not some data centre in northern Virginia<\/a>? <\/p>\n I do try not to be a Luddite, and I am sure artificial intelligence will end up assisting us with all manner of scientific breakthroughs. I am also an eternal optimist. But I can\u2019t help feeling that AI is, nonetheless, killing some of the magic of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some people \u2014 certain interested parties in northern California in particular \u2014 will say my reaction is silly and unenlightened, and that similar moans were aired at the dawn of the internet, the synthesiser, the computer, the spinning jenny. Why shouldn\u2019t I get just as much joy and satisfaction from witnessing artificially generated creativity, artistry and humour? Why shouldn\u2019t my tears roll just as freely at an emotive bit of prose written by a large language model?\u00a0<\/p>\n Furthermore, they will contest, there is no \u201cmagic\u201d. As Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, posted on X<\/a> in 2023, \u201cEverything \u2018creative\u2019 is a remix of things that happened in the past, plus epsilon and times the quality of the feedback loop and the number of iterations\u201d. (Ah yes, the voice of someone who really gets creativity and artistry.) \u201cPeople think they should maximize epsilon but the trick is to maximize the other two.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By \u201cepsilon\u201d, a word used in mathematics to refer to something infinitesimally small, Altman seems to mean the je ne sais quoi, the artistic spark, the\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009magic. And this, he implies, is trivial. Well, call me a fool, but I find it hard to believe that there was no magic in the room when Paul McCartney crafted The Beatles\u2019 hit song Get Back in two minutes flat<\/a>, and that this can be boiled down to a simple creativity equation such as Altman\u2019s. Or that an eight-year-old Mozart was not tapping into some kind of higher power when he wrote his first symphony<\/a>. Maybe I\u2019m talking about God. Will God survive the AI revolution?\u00a0<\/p>\n Such channelling of some kind of higher power \u2014 even for those who believe this power resides solely in our brains \u2014\u00a0is at the very least endangered, as people turn increasingly to generative AI to allow them to bypass such an effortful activity. And while yes, I\u2019m sure AI can \u201cboost\u201d or \u201csupercharge\u201d your creativity as countless blog posts, social media threads and podcasts will tell you, it can also hugely limit it. So even if we get to a place in which AI truly does eclipse human creativity, it is this channelling that we must preserve if we are to keep experiencing what it means to be a human.<\/p>\n Because what utilitarian tech bros like Altman don\u2019t seem to get is that creativity is not just about the final output; the act of being creative is itself in many ways the point. I am currently learning the guitar, not because I want to turn it into an alternative revenue stream for myself, but because of the sheer joy I get from sitting around singing songs with other people. No one \u2014 either human or machine \u2014 can take away that magic.\u00a0<\/p>\n