Writer: Mohd Ayan
Editor: Advik Mohan
Illustrator: Shresha Kumar
The internet was meant for great things. Then humans were invented and boy did things go immediately wrong.
The above is a ludicrously rambunctious statement that seems to encompass the wildly creative ideas of which we humans are capable, as well as our relationship with the Age of Information. When conceptualized, the above was what came to my mind as I processed through my half-a-dozen tabs of research. And yet.
Herein, I intend to elaborate upon my thoughts about a term that was once a sci-fi fad but has seemingly materialized into the IRL, and is increasingly taking over the world: Computational creativity.
As defined by OpenMind, Computational creativity is the study of building software that exhibits behavior that would be deemed creative in humans. This software is able to create artwork, poems, blogs, intricate stories, and much more; and for the past couple of months, humanity has been getting increasingly enamored by its abilities. In the course of working on this project, I was sidetracked into generating dozens of weird artworks on the OpenAI software DALL E 2. It ranged from Brendon Urie performing his latest album in a tan tux on the surface of Mars to purple King Kong arm wrestling Chuck Norris, and so on.
What I noticed (apart from the usual nature of how awesome it was as a tool) is the fact that softwares like these only appear to be creatively original. The modus operandi of computationally creative softwares like midjourney, DALL E, and ChatGPT is the derivative nature of it; these machines scour the internet for similarly coded images, text, or art that they decipher through their machine learning capabilities, and generate derived pieces that are then displayed. The growing concern that this process raises ( and something that personally irks me) is, why?
Art, creativity, literature, are inherently humanistic traits that have been a hallmark of our species since the first time a cave dweller used red ochre to draw mammoths deep in the hearts of ever-conquerable mountains. Furthered by Picasso and da Vinci and Rembrandt and Dali and Botticelli and Banksy and even that fellow with the less-than-average number of external ear apparatus. Revolts and outrage in artist circles, competition between artists who sit behind a canvas or screen or blank wall and hack away at it in order to express, and a bunch of code saying ‘hey look what I can do’ and then gimmicking. This piece is not intended to be a criticism of Artificial Intelligence and its ability to solve problems, but rather at the reevaluation of the priority list of which technology should tick-mark through. We are a civilization on the doorstep of the stars. When we set foot on one, wielding our superbly powerful telescope, we will aim it at our home and see dead eyes juggling data sheets. Dusty children pulling out ore from the heart of the planet, and ants milling about on the surface of the Ballin perpetuity, doing things that don’t need doing.
Isn’t that what technology was conceptualized as doing? Aiding the Human Machine? The lightbulb combated darkness, the printing press made sure we all read , and automatic hand-held weaponry realized our dreams of being able to kill efficiently. What we are witnessing now is not another advancement that furthers the Human Spirit, but rather subtracts from it. I am blessed to be able to leave this wild-goose-chase-of-an-article in as abrupt a note as the following:
How do we intend to answer the agnostic gods of existentialist Human Spirit of what we are, when we are creating consumerist products and derivatively creative machines, while we sit glassy-eyed and break metaphorical rocks with metaphorical rocks?
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