There are legitimate concerns about AI and the impact it will have on people who write, paint, make songs, and do graphic design. It will change things but mostly for the commodity producers.

Technology has been replacing commodity work since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Makers of commodity content will be put out of work by AI the same way weavers of common fabrics were put out of work by the mill. The Luddites tried to sabotage the industrial production of commodity fabrics because it was taking away their jobs. That didn’t work out. People wanted inexpensive cotton and wool fabric. They might have felt bad for the spinners and weavers who lost their work, but that didn’t stop them from buying a suit made from tweed made in a mill.

Does anyone think the AI replacement of commodity “content” is going to be any different?

Rage against it all you like. It’s here. It’s not going away. Figure out how to deal.

Fortunately, there is some upside too.

Creativity requires emotion.

AI can only copy and combine. It can’t transform anything. It doesn’t feel. It never had a life.

It wasn’t scared of the dark when it was seven. It never had a bully. It never played make believe with it’s friends. It doesn’t get black out drunk on Friday night. It doesn’t get up early to go to breakfast with its grandma before church.

It doesn’t know what’s cool or what’s lame. It has no taste. It has no discernment. It is a pattern recognition and reproduction engine.

It can calculate and generate things we recognizes as “text” or “image” hella fast. It doesn’t create anything new. It is merely reassembling the fragments of things created by people. People who loved, cried, danced, hated, mourned, exalted, feared. People who lived real lives with real experiences.

AI copies and combines. It can’t transform.

If you are an artist, illustrator, writer, publisher; the way you beat the machine is by doing what it cannot. Create for emotion. Tap into what you feel so that other people who read your work, watch your film, hear your music can feel that as well.

Copy, combine and transform. Bluegrass, jazz, and blues were combined and then transformed into rock and roll. Rock and Roll became heavy metal and hip hop.

Can an AI do what Chuck Berry did? Can AI do what Grandmaster Flash did?

AI copies but does it make art?

I’ve done some experiments to see how AI does with creating ideas for sandbox campaigns and adventures. The results were cliche, unoriginal combinations of high fantasy tropes. I got some interesting writing prompts that I could transform into something interesting but nothing better than I could have picked up from a random generator in a book or blog post. Chat GPT is adequate for generating commodity “content marketing” and formulaic hack work.

It isn’t creating a new sub-genre of fantasy fiction, making an iconic pen and ink drawing of your favorite monster, or recording a song that will soothe your heartache.

AI is going to cause some disruptions. The “Top Five Ways to Get Rich in 2023” listicle writers will have to find some other way to earn a living by not doing any actual work.

I believe the artists who do the difficult emotional work of being vulnerable and taking risks will be fine.

Most likely, they’ll be in greater demand than ever before.