AI, creativity and citizenship

A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us (Emerson)

In the numerous debates around AI that have been taking place lately, we have all heard ‘tout et son contraire’, as we say – we heard everything in all directions, for all arguments. Some say it will save the world, some that it will destroy it; some claim AI will make us better, or freer, or more creative, or more intelligent, while others will claim the exact opposite – time gained will be spent on scrawling, not learning, we will forget simple stuff, we will lose ourselves and what makes us who we are. Bertrand Russell wrote (I think in the 30s?) a little book on how we would all benefit from having 4-hour work- days: instead of slaving away behind a desk or at a machine for eight hours each day, let’s work less and create time for ourselves. Russell’s hope was that we’d use that time to educate ourselves so as to become better people. A claim many AI-supporters replicate today, in all shapes and forms, for example:

•     AI will save us time on boring tasks so we can do other things (but what?)
•     AI will solve most of our difficult problems so that we can concentrate on other things (but on what?)
•     AI will answer questions that would take us a long time to research: it’s more effective, in fact it’s more…time-effective (can you see which question should be in this bracket?)
•     AI will enable us to get going when we’ve run out of ideas, to get our creative juices flowing (but what is being creative in this case? Having an idea, or filling in the blanks on the skeleton provided by the idea?)

This reminds me of what music Youtuber Rick Beato keeps saying: when he receives an email from someone who claims that they ‘wrote a song with AI because I know nothing about music’, his reaction is: no you didn’t, the machine wrote the song, not you. When I ask AI to generate ideas for me so that I can write them up, we have to ask: who’s being creative? Who’s being a machine?

Answer:   no-one is creative (the human didn’t come up with an idea; the machine doesn’t create  anything                 new)
                the human, by performing a mechanical, convention-based task (writing words and sentences)                    becomes the machine

Not convinced? Look at this picture I lifted off LinkedIn two weeks ago, from a well-known Dutch consultant on education and AI: see the blue bit, bottom-left? The one about ‘Ideas’? ([Idee]) The one this consultant delegates to AI when he has a ‘writer’s block’? Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that someone who wants to write an article on a subject he knows and lives off of needs a machine to help him come up with ideas? I mean, isn’t it what he’s supposed to do himself? To have his own ideas on the subject? Why on earth would I want to read AI’s ideas (which, of course, are not ideas but predictions based on pre-existing material)? There’s a reason I don’t ask AI to write this blog; I’ve thought about the stuff I write about, these are my ideas. They may be good, they may be bad, they may be dull or brilliant, but they are mine.

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So, in this illustration, who’s creative?
Answer: no-one. The consultant will write up what the machine ‘thought’ and organized (a mightily important skill that, by the way – organizing information, ranking it etc., but ok); that is, he will put into words ideas from somewhere else. Then he will publish it as ‘his’ article – scroll back up until you read the name of that Youtuber I mentioned: funny, right? Illuminating, is it not? Who wrote the song? Who wrote the article? Is an article the act of putting words on the page, or the result of thoughts organized and reflected upon, where the words are really a secondary consideration?

I think those people confuse ‘Writing as a linguistic and academically-framed act’ with ‘Thinking before I write’- thinking for writing (echoing the famous Slobin’s Thinking for Speaking), the thinking necessary to even begin to consider starting to write. The ideas you need (the knowledge you need, the understanding, the ability to synthesize, the relations between parts, the argumentation, the thinking from start to finish): that’s writing. The words, the sentences, the APA, the bibliography: that’s the package required to make the writing receivable by the community, and to enable its communication to others. Confusing those two leads to consultants and others claiming for themselves what they have not done: they ‘wrote’ an article only in the sense of putting words on something that already exists, but they have not done the thinking part – and surely the thinking part, not mastery of APA or academic phrasing, is what makes us human.

I fear the same applies to those claims of ‘being creative’. Sure, there are obviously ways in which AI can lead to creative tasks, or to encourage human creativity. But here again it’s important to make sure we do not confuse our terms. Typing a prompt in Midjourney (a popular AI image-generator) might be considered ‘creative’ but really, this necessitates a deep think about what that word now means. Crafting a nice prompt to get a machine to generate a piece of music is really, really not like composing that music. Creating a prompt to get a machine to generate ideas and the ways to organize them, to justify them, finding references and definitions: that’s really, really not the same as doing that yourself.

This is not a moral point: I’m not a Luddite, I’m not against machines, and AI has applications (in medicine, say) that will literally save lives. Fine. I’m not saying ‘Do it yourself’ is morally, inherently better. What I am saying is that we need to be careful not to lie to ourselves, justifying our inability to do something with things like ‘Lack of time’, or ‘I know could do it so I don’t need to prove that by actually doing it’. Ask yourself: can you actually do it? Are you not using nice words like ‘Creative’ so that you can hide behind them, and conceal the fact that you are not creative?

This is not about sweat, elbow-grease, do-it-yourself damn it!
This is about what we (should) value: thinking for ourselves, thinking about others, being curious, wanting to know and understand. This is about the necessity (moral, philosophical, societal) of wanting to know and understand, of needing to engage with the world around us.

As a citizen I go to specialists for practical stuff: a car mechanic, an electrician, a family doctor, a plumber or a blogging platform.
But as a citizen, surrounded by different people thinking different thoughts, seeing different things, there is NO specialist I can go to all the time. I will go to them to inform myself, to get different perspectives, but ultimately the responsibility is mine.

Which responsibility? That of living in the world, of making sense of my environment, of deciding how to live with others, of deciding how to make it all work. That requires thinking, considering, reflecting, learning, adapting: something you need to do for yourself – something you cannot afford to delegate.

And I don’t think we should relinquish that responsibility to a mindless, reproductive, Western-defined, morally biased machine which does not – cannot – have our best interests at heart, by simple virtue of having no bloody heart, or mind, or lungs, or experience of the world. I don’t ask ants or elephants to help me be in the world: why on earth would I think a mindless machine could do the job?