The first-ever World AI Film Festival was held in France recently.
Marco Landi, ex-Apple Worldwide COO, who organised it, told Screen Daily it would address concerns about AI’s potential to destroy creativity, and instead explore how it can fuel our “imagination”. Screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, who led the festival’s jury, added with what will prove to be a just as enduring and tricky question: “Will there be the same passion among audiences if they know something was created by a robot?”
Whether you’re into music, fine art, employed as a programmer or journalist, or regularly provide critical judgments, such as a doctor with a patient, will it continue to matter at all if you were partially or fully aided by an algorithm?
These questions will become more urgent as AI continues its unstoppable encroachment into every aspect of life, impossible to ignore and something we’ll all need to come to terms with sooner rather than later.
Yet, is its rapid rise equally a symptom of our age? One dominated by smartphones, alienated young generations, COVID-induced preference for home working, to students who prefer remote learning, instead of being stuck in the same lectures as their classmates and tutors. A recent survey found 25 per cent of young adults prefer solace in non-human, surrogate AI friendships, going as far as to suggest it could one day replace human romance.
Perhaps, none of this should surprise us, when countless Large Language Models (LLMs), ChatGPTs, and countless other algorithmic tools can draw upon terabytes of human knowledge — already scanned, sorted, and indexed — producing answers, artefacts, and outputs in seconds, far beyond the capability of any individual human mind.
And yet, despite what AI’s many advocates might claim, none of it is remotely human. No AI is sentient, can imagine, let alone reason. Nevertheless, while not thinking machines as such, the innovation is in using the technology as a highly sophisticated prediction engine — offering up answers with impressive confidence, but, crucially, with never perfect accuracy.
Still, as some argue, does that distinction matter to the untrained eye? Is “good enough”… good enough for now? Do we care if an AI produces a passable pop song all by itself? Generates an entire film from a single prompt? Or could offer up a reasonably accurate prediction, after sifting through mountains of data, that otherwise would take, for example, a clinician months, if not longer, to do?
As humans, do we mind these and many other kinds of hallucinations and imperfections? If it means instant access to unlimited knowledge, prototypes, and stimulus, at little cost or effort?
Or, was songwriter Nick Cave right, when he argued that most of all, what makes something relatable, authentic, especially trustworthy, is when we know it’s the result of someone’s intellectual and creative struggle:
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel.
But will Cave’s view quickly become anachronistic, less relevant for the world ahead? Much like the advent of the printing press — which opened up knowledge beyond the domain of the few — will AI enable everyone with their own chatbot to become an everyday genius?
Or will this eliminate the last vestiges of what makes us uniquely human: being part of a culture built upon genuine human dialogue with all the inevitable blood, sweat and tears, necessary to achieve something remarkably human?
Ps. When I asked ChatGPT for a light edit of this story, it was temporarily offline.