The difference between work created by humans and AI
Starting from the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century of machines work instead of humans, machines and AI are now able to imitate human work or even surpass it. According to the research of Nomura Research Institute, 49% of Japan’s working population can be replaced by AI. On the other hand, jobs that expect creativity are seen as unable to be imitated by AI. People think that upon AI creation, something brand new would not be created and that AI creates only from statistics of what already exists. Nowadays AI-based techniques are even used in work such as images and music generated without involving humans. Is “creative” work still safe from the march of AI innovation?
By using more than a thousand data sets of Pokémon images, I trained the GAN image generating model and tried to make new Pokémon that don’t exist. There are two versions of trained data from normal Pokémon image and pixel Pokémon image. From this, it generates Pokémon-like creatures. The generated monster mostly has blue grayish color and is shaped like an ameba with nonequal legs but it still has a Pokémon-style eye on. Still some monsters look like creatures and based on those images we made a fictional Pokémon dictionary (Pokédex).
AI-generated Pokémon become an inspiration for making new Pokémon. From how the monster looks we guess what kind of type it has, how big it is if it evolved, and what kind of habit it has. Many existing Pokémon have their model but since the generated image was unclear and hard to recognize, we need to use our imagination to think about what this Pokémon can be based on. If I didn’t use AI-generated Pokémon to create new Pokémon, I think I couldn’t make that many new Pokémon. Since there are more than thousands of Pokémon images it is extremely hard to create a new Pokémon. But since AI-generated Pokémon was an unexpected creature, I was able to make new creatures.
I think this Pokémon generator can be used as an easy monster maker in the future. When you are making a project and want to use images for the work, it better have to be a free image so you won’t have to pay money or get sued for using the image. But for AI-generated images, the judiciary judges that many creations made by AI and not humans, do not have copyrights. So at this moment, AI-generated images are free images and people can use them as they want. But by this, the creator that created the AI generator could not protect their work by copyrights. So this could change as AI creation increases in the future too.
The impact of the AI-generated image is not only on the creator of the AI and the user of the AI generator. With the increase in the use of fast easy free images made by AI, illustrators that have been drawing images can lose their jobs. Usually, the benefit of buying an image from illustrators is that the buyer can put specific points on what they want on their image. But innovation in AI-generated images made it possible to generate specific images the user wanted by setting keywords.
AI was thought to not surpass humans in creative work, the definition of creativity is becoming vague as AI starts to make high-quality images that satisfy humans. How is the image made by humans and the image generated by AI different if both satisfy the viewer? Although the Pokémon generator I made was an incomplete call as Pokémon, AI is now possible to generate high-quality images of landscapes and it has no problem using the same as human-made illustrations. Illustrators will have to compete against AI which makes it fast and perhaps cheap with acceptable quality. Or even people may prefer AI that can make unexpected images that humans can’t think of and seek creativity upon it. I think creativity will not only belong to humans in the future.
