In the past year, I have been involved in many conversations about the ethics of generative artificial intelligence. In my role as an editor at a student-run newspaper, we have had to draw the line between what is acceptable, what applications are strictly off-limits and the repercussions to be enacted when we believe without a doubt generative AI has been used.
As a student studying English and creative writing, I have seen a wider range of debate. Across the board in my classes AI use of any kind is prohibited — a class required for the major went so far as to make sure our spell-check features are turned off. With the exception of that spell-check policy, I fully support these bans — we are students paying tens of thousands of dollars to get an education, and offloading our learning to machines is akin to setting fire to a bank all the while our brains atrophy.
In class, these discussions are typically a short and curt message from the instructor, and discussion does not linger. In one creative writing class, however, it went deeper and nearly took up an entire class period. We talked about the role of writing, the societal importance of artistic creation and the ethics of training Large Language Models on pre-existing writing, and for the first time, I left a conversation on AI feeling something very odd — Hope.
That conversation gave me a chance to talk about what I believe to be the foundation of all my thoughts about generative AI in the creative field: the importance of learning how to engage with art. While art’s place of birth cannot be easily or accurately simplified, I hold the belief that by and large, it is borne of feeling.
AI cannot feel. AI can create jumbled amalgamations of feeling, but it is not real and it is neither learned nor earned. That “feeling” is a machine. That “feeling” is not new; it is not creative and it is not genuine. AI can mimic life, and it can take existing work and repackage it as something new, but I do not believe that is the same as creation. As a peer of mine present in the aforementioned discussion aptly put it, “AI was never dumped at prom.”
I am in a very vulnerable position to be in during the dawn of generative AI — I am many things, but more than anything else, I am a writer. I am also a student, and I am also an aspiring journalist. The news has given me plenty of reasons to be concerned, from The Washington Post’s mass layoffs in favor of AI tools or the alarming polls that show half of this country’s working adults reported to be using AI on a near-daily basis.
To be quite honest, I am scared. I am scared that the profession that has been my dream since I could read and write will no longer exist by the time I am able to reach it. I am deeply scared, but I am not alone in that feeling.
Artists have been feeling this same pressure for millennia. This summer, I picked up a copy of Luigi Pirandello’s “The Late Mattia Pascal,” a lesser-known classic absurdist novel following a man searching for his meaning after being believed to be dead. About halfway in I was overcome by how much I related to Pirandello’s musings on the industrial revolution.
One quote in particular stuck out to me: “And what will man do when machines do everything for him? … Even if we admire all the inventions that science sincerely believes will enrich our lives (instead they make it poorer, because their price is so high), what joy do they bring us, after all?”
What if this revolutionary technology, supposedly designed to enrich our lives has nothing to do with happiness or fulfillment? What is the price we never expected to pay?
It is comforting to know that I am not just a scared young creative sitting at her desk, feverishly writing down notes into a Moleskine or typing away past midnight to document that her life is real, that her work might matter. Because I know I am not alone in this fear and this fight, I still have motivation to keep going, to keep writing and keep creating.
I do believe that we, even if only on a small level, know how to interact with art. We know what feelings it evokes in us; we know how impactful that song we heard after a bad breakup was; we remember that short line from a book we read once; we know how happy we were to only be kids passing time by scribbling little drawings on multicolored construction paper.
Maybe it is pure blind optimism, but I have faith that we are not alone. In many ways, I know that for certain, humans have a primal need for art, and when we begin to realize something we are engaging with meaningfully was generated by a machine, we disengage.
Just within this past year, the publishing giant Hachette cancelled the publication of “Shy Girl,” a novel speculated to be a product of generative AI, and Pitchfork, a music critic magazine, gave a rare zero-point rating — its first in nearly two decades — to an album by once-popular rapper Tyga after he admitted he used AI in production.
It is my greatest hope that this rigorous and critically informed process of engaging with art continues.
Hope is a powerful force. Hope is what fuels me to write, and that is enough for now.
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