I started an entirely different post this week about how we need to fight the coming darkness of A.I. and then I read the quote that has inspired this week’s missive. My next post will share some thoughts on a difficult path forward through the new A.I. landscape.
Bag of hammers meet your twin brother, filmmaker James Cameron, speaking to Meta about A.I., sourced from Graham Lovelace’s Charting Gen A.I.—-
“Anybody that’s an artist, anybody that’s a human being, is a model,” said Cameron, equating the training of large language models (LLMs) to the way creators become influenced by artistic styles. “I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective as to what’s the output, not what’s the input. You can’t control my input, you can’t tell me what to view and what to see and where to go. My input is whatever I choose it to be, and whatever has accumulated throughout my life. My output, every script I write, should be judged on whether it’s too close, too plagiaristic, whatever,” said Cameron.
This is the argument of the thieves, grifters, and the least creative people on this planet. This makes me doubt that anything Cameron has ever done is original, because I know the difference between all the incredible influences of my life and the unique personal dedication I have devoted to the expression of my visual work.
My inspiration from other people’s creativity—-my favourite painter is Max Beckmann— does not strip their livelihood from their hands, Beckmann’s work kicks my ass and challenges my complacency because it is raw and visceral and HUMAN. Another popular argument is the agist one—as an old person, I’m just stuck in my ways and I want to hold onto a buggy whip—I welcome innovation and new approaches, but I do despise a technology that is fueled on copyright infringement so that idiots like Cameron can pretend it’s a benign output—-just a pixel pusher—nothing to see here.
Look at the slop we already have on Google and Instagram. I’ve never been on TikTok so I can’t speak to that eyesore. None of this comes without knock on effects, and our hard fought for creative minds are not going to be supercharged but numbed into retreat and passivity. The physical, cognitive, and emotional grit necessary to produce creative work is what powers it’s value to create meaning and solve problems, the greased visual sluices of A.I. propel us past all the things we should be holding onto and paying attention to on a journey that will not lead to great art but more distraction and mind numbing visual noise. We are creating apps that are removing our manipulation of tools from the equation—-the inputs to use Cameron’s reductive term, and without these inputs what fresh inspiration is being pumped into the lifeless corpse of A.I.—-how does A.I. feed A.I.?
The next step will be removing word prompts, just let the preference of what drives the attention of masses of people drive the generative direction. Like a murmuration, the pixels will coalesce to create more mindless mesmerizing content that our sad reptilian brains will latch onto and crave. Our addictions are only beginning.