AI in society and creativity
AI has the potential to bring radical and perhaps world-changing innovations for humans in the future and help society progress forward in an era of modern technology.
It is common knowledge that AI is used to help humans reduce the burden on their shoulders by performing mundane or tedious tasks and helps enhance speed, precision, and effectiveness of human efforts.
Let’s take an example to thoroughly understand what this means. Few months ago I looked into something called ‘Google Lens’. It allows users to search what they see. Google Lens may be described as a search engine for the real world.
Simply put, it’s like the google search engine but instead of typing in what one wants to search, they can switch their cameras on and point the camera at the object, text, outfit, etc. It can also get text translated in real time, have plants and animals identified, etc. as per what the user wants.
With the ability to identify text and objects both within images and in a live view, it lets one learn about and interact with the real world. Say you’re searching for a plant you saw at a street, but not knowing the name or the species of plant, you’re left with no choice but to look up all plants and eventually come down to the plant you want. Here’s where something like Google Lens comes in handy. Thanks to Google’s AI and AR platform and advanced deep learning routines, it identifies objects and information related to it using visual analysis based on a neural network and empower detection capabilities that can easily help in identifying the plant and help you out by taking away the pain of sitting in front of a laptop for hours going through thousands of images on the web just for the name of ONE plant.
Another example of how AI can help society is in image recognition. More accurately, live image feed recognition. Something my group and I worked on this spring was a trained AI model with the help of Teachable Machine that could recognize rock, paper, or scissors based on what was shown in front of the camera, live.
Imagine this exact model expanded at a much larger scale. This can solve crime cases by finding the perpetrator with the help of cameras on streets, can be used in smart fridges to identify what all items are being put in the fridge, or possibly in labs to identify certain kind of chemicals by their distinguishable looks just to make it easier and timesaving for everyone.
To some, the words AI and creativity put together mean nothing more than just words. However, if one thinks in depth, the two words mean more than what one can recognize. One ponders the question, “Can AI really be creative?”. The question is quite valid and thought-provoking.
Instead of thinking AI is a way to replace human creativity, I think it is a way to ‘boost’ human creativity instead. When we associate this concept with art or creativity in general, I visualize AI to reduce the amount of time one would spend being creative. In simple words, what if AI helped providing ideas? The amount of time one would spend thinking on something could easily be reduced and help people execute their ideas born from this creativity for the benefit of the society.
But how exactly can AI be creative in general to help provide ideas to humans? AI can go through millions of pictures, references, ideas on the internet and merge many of them to come up with an entirely new idea. Or can make transformations to current ideas to give birth to a new one. There are many ways to how AI can help be creative.
This discussion would not be complete without talking a bit about the downsides of AI too. Everything has positives and negatives to themselves, and it seems appropriate to talk about why we shouldn’t be too addicted with this concept of AI aiding humans in creativity. Although this concept does help humans, I personally think this should not be completely relied upon. Yes, it does help give ideas and create new ideas of existing ideas but being totally dependent on this would, in my opinion, limits a human’s natural ability to expand their vision, thought, and mind for creativity. Hanging onto this for too long may make humans think that they do not need to use their own minds for creativity which, I believe, is a dead end for humanity as it is a part of what makes us human.
