IS AI MAKING ARTISTS OBSOLETE?

An award-winning film industry artist with a long line of A film screen credits wrote to me. Here’s what he says about the dangers of AI (artificial intelligence) – with my comments:

KEITH: Love your erudite soliloquy. Here it is in full, with my comments:

YOU: I had a thought. If the artists are the dream engine of today’s technological society, the ones who spark innovation in the engineers and technologists, what happens when AI replaces them?

ME: Won’t the engineers and technologists use AI instead? 

YOU: It’s just beginning. What will be the benefit to an individual, to go to art school, when AI spits out increasingly evolved art at an uncatchable rate?

ME: It’ll be interesting to see if the art schools will flounder or find a new way of delivering artifice, i.e.., new artificial representations of human mental, physical and spiritual experience.

YOU: The writers of Star Trek are responsible for the inspiration of the iPhone. The science fiction writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, are responsible for space travel, and the reach for the stars. 

ME: The “final frontier” is spiritual, not physical.

YOU: When Homer recited to the young children around him, of the Iliad and the Odyssey… imagine the technological and cultural expansion that wrought.

The same from any storyteller. In any medium. Artists all. 

Imagine… (while you still have the soon to be vestigial muscle, that manifests the imagination) how the direction of humanity is already being determined by AI, as the human dream makers are quietly being retired.

ME: Yes, but times always change. Existence is evolutionary. Evolution proceeds as it always has from before human existence. Change is constant. Even mere human existence adapts. 

Is imagination just a newish appendix of the mind? Does imagination now face a future of uselessness? 

Is the new, evolutionary demand for the data and facts of real life existence, that AI gives, taking over for the time being? 

Then what will overtake AI?

YOU: Interesting times. No longer driven by the human dream engines…

ME: Oh I think humans will change and exist if they’re necessary. Artifice will re-form, change and abound as and if evolution demands…   

YOU: Had to write it down. The muse passed it on to me, and I wanted to respect that force. Before it’s dissipated by our path to ‘progress’. 

ME: The evidence of a path for 80% of the human race suggests the path is never lit beyond their capabilities to see. Even mystics don’t see infinity. 

YOU: I think I’ll have a beer tonight! 🙂

ME: Go sailing too! Contemplate further, drift into meditation and take what’s offered for the now …

All Is Well.

Mysticexperiences.net