At a recent get together with some other authors, the conversation turned to the subject of Artificial Intelligence in the creative world. Initially, the collective tone was a superficial and disparaging one, until it became apparent that one of our number actually knew what he was talking about, with a deep understanding of the history of AI, its (current) limitations, as well as what it’s already very good at.

In a nutshell, AI is great at responding to whatever parameters people choose to set for it. It absorbs vast amounts of data and learns from it, able to reach into whichever parts of that sea of information it’s told to look at. One interesting point is that if you set it to draw on the entire history of literature, including vast periods of time that saw very different societal attitudes to our own, you shouldn’t be surprised if what it produces reflects those outdated attitudes. If you want to include the whole wealth of the history of literature in your data sample, don’t be surprised if AI produces work that is racist and misogynistic by modern standards. If you ask it to draw on a more modern set of parameters, expect a more modern sensibility. AI is morally undiscerning. It does what we tell it to and it does it thoroughly. We’re now at a point where AI can be asked to write something for a particular purpose or in a particular style. If you’ve engaged with online text-based interaction with a company website, there’s a very good chance that the person you’ve been dealing with isn’t necessarily a ‘real person’.

As I see it, there are two arguments against using AI for creative work, each entirely independent of the other.

The first one is quality and character. Can AI produce something as good as a human? Can AI conjure the instinctive spark of originality that a real human creative brings to a project? Most writers I know would say ‘no’ when it comes to writing, although I know some who are happy to turn to AI when it comes to creating book covers. Before we get too smug and secure in our writers’ ivory towers, what AI is doing now was beyond the realms of possibility ten years ago, and what it will be capable of achieving in ten years’ time is likely to be just as big a leap forward. If the answer to this one is ‘no’ now, it doesn’t mean that will always be the case.

The second question is more of an ethical one. Each time one of my writer friends turns to AI for a book cover, pleading economy (a bigger deal for the self-published as opposed to those of us with a publisher to stand behind), it takes a vital commission and fee away from a designer, illustrator or artist who is also trying to earn a living doing the thing they love. If writers are indignant at having our creative role usurped by lines of computer code, it’s hypocritical of us to actively conspire in sidelining of our fellow creatives.

I’ve never used AI as part of my creative process, and I asked the resident expert what I was missing out on. He explained that while he never used AI to write part of his work, he did use it as a tool for editing. The example he gave was that when writing fantasy fiction (his genre), he feels that he struggles with making battle scenes compelling. To rectify that, he would feed his draft scenes into an AI engine and ask it for comments, then respond to that analysis. He compared this with writers reading work in progress to writers’ groups and getting feedback from their peers. As I write this, I am currently on hold with my third novel while I wait for a couple of friends to read the latest draft and give me some critical feedback. To some extent, what he describes is just a quicker version of that same process, so why do I feel less comfortable with the idea of it?

I’m writing this while listening to the Nick Drake album Pink Moon. Could AI come up with a facsimile of Nick Drake’s work? Possibly. Would it have come up with it first? Absolutely not (not yet, anyway). Would we want to listen to it if it did? Now that’s a harder question. How much of the lure of Drake’s music is the glimpse it gives into a complex, tortured soul, and how much is just inherent in the music in and of itself? Would it have the same creative weight if we knew it was just churned out by an algorithm?

Instinctively, I’m against using AI, even in the way my new friend described, but it’s entirely possible that time will judge me as a later-day luddite on the wrong side of history. One other comment our AI guru made was that big business has invested too much money in the process to go backwards and start again. Whatever happens next will build on the foundations that are already in place. In other words, the genie is out of the bottle. Not only can we not get it back in, we don’t even know where the bottle is any more.

Image credit: "Robotlab : bios [bible] (2007)" by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.