The Total Annihilation of Human Creators by AI

Creative individuals should be feeling desperate now, yet there are emerging arguments that seem to be what they want to hear — that it’s still somewhat safe, while AI is already gravely threatening their work and careers.

Creative individuals don’t realize that they are under the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge or competence in a domain tend to overestimate their own ability. Believing AI is not that capable provides a psychological buffer against the anxiety and insecurity of the AI crisis. By convincing themselves they are still competitive, individuals can avoid the discomfort associated with acknowledging AI’s threat to their careers.

When people are under the Dunning-Kruger effect, you’ll see a lot of quasi-persuasive, weak-arguing articles appearing everywhere in the news, written by authors who either have limited knowledge of AI or a very strong reluctance to see the world drastically change because of AI. In other words, these tend to be seasoned authors who have been living for years hearing that “Whew, AI is still so stupid. We need no worry.” They are reluctant to rethink now when the large model AI comes into place.

I am going to counterargue the arguments made in Sarah Laing’s article in CPA Canada. Her arguments show common beliefs of human commentators, and we have to reveal the cruel truth behind them.

False Argument 1: AI needs to be “called” by human in order to get started

It still requires a prompt from a human.

No. It doesn’t.

AI technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate, continually pushing the boundaries of what was once considered impossible. Recent breakthroughs in the “input” aspects of AI models, such as GPT-4o, demonstrate significant improvements in language understanding and generation. In short, there will come a day when input is modified to be prompt-less. The AI will no longer need a human as its master — it only needs to stay with humans and it knows what it needs to do.

False Argument 2: AI may not be factually correct.

It’s putting out content that’s plausible and grammatically correct, but not factually correct.

Not really.

AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data enables it to generate content that is not only grammatically correct but also increasingly factually accurate. AI can create more sophisticated and diverse content than any human can. Future AI systems will incorporate real-time fact-checking and cross-referencing, further enhancing their factual accuracy. And, have you ever had the experience of talking to a human full of lies while still being persuaded by them? Well, AI will be an even better artist when it comes to persuading people.

False Argument 3: AI may create unsafe work which is biased.

“Right now, ChatGPT is trained on a corpus of human text, and we know that some humans can be sexist, racist, ageist, have cultural biases and all those things.”

No, definitely not true.

While AI can reflect the biases present in its training data, so can humans. Human beings are inherently biased, and our training prevents us from revealing it easily. However, these hidden biases affect many areas of our work, such as the choice of characters. AI’s ability to adapt and learn from diverse datasets ensures that it can create content that is inclusive and free from human prejudices. The most important advantage of AI is that it doesn’t have any unchangeable stereotypes in its core like all humans do. So it won’t stay biased forever.

False Argument 4: AI’s work is still full of errors and needs humans to check before it goes to market.

“But for the near future, I still would imagine there’d be a role for a human with an aesthetic eye to do the curation or final decisions.”

No need.

AI can augment human creativity by suggesting ideas, plot twists, or stylistic changes that a human writer might not consider. Best yet, this AI work will be verified by itself as it improves and learns from ongoing interactions rather than a year-old cold training database.

After all, people are omitting a very important fact about art consumption. While we are arguing whether or not AI can create as well as human beings can, we forget that the other end, the consuming side, will always be human. It’s human customers who will be receiving these artworks, whether it’s a song, a painting, an ad banner, a novel, or a movie. As long as human beings are happy with the AI work, the AI wins. The human creators have to concede defeat because they are betrayed by their own species.

In conclusion, creative artists of all forms are truly in danger.

And, the road to defeating creative artists is not by making AI work as human-like as human creators but by generating something that surpasses all human work. It’s like going to a movie theater, seeing a movie, and knowing it’s the best movie you’ve ever seen. And weirdly, even knowing it’s done by AI, you cannot stop yourself from loving it. The AI wins because, after all, it’s all about creativity — whoever can “surprise” always wins. And whoever argues conservatively will only be outdated and replaced by the bold, wild challenger.