So you too think AI will replace you
It might one day, just not yet.
Before we start I’m being informed this post is too long for email. So to enjoy the full reading experience you may want to read it on the Substack website here.
And now, we’re good to go.
I started writing these lines after a very intense day at the office, which began with a meeting with a Central Government tech specialist to discuss AI and how we (myself and my colleagues in the creative team) are rebranding to Creative Technology from our previous Creative Industries name.
“Makes more sense given your focus ” he said nodding as my and my colleagues kept talking about immersive technologies, the metaverse, AI, advertising, fashiontech, games, esports, and film. Some of the areas we cover.
At 3 pm, when the sugar craving hits hard, it’s time for a coffee and a biscuit, and a bit of chitchat with a colleague. Only that in my case it was about AI and creativity, which quickly led to what it means to be human in the age of AI, a conversation that attracted yet another colleague as we jumped back and forth from technology, art, content creation, what qualities really define being human (is it creativity, is it critical thinking, or is it emotion?), and how silo mentality when it comes to two apparently opposing forces such as creativity and technology is outdated in the age of AI. Your average casual kitchen chat.
Then off to a client call with a North American company that has developed an AI software solution to help retailers improve their ecommerce operations and product search offer and is looking to expand in London before a colleague comes to my desk and informs me he’s organising a roundtable on AI skills in case I have any clients I want to invite.
This prompts me to share my disappointment about how AI is failing me to manifest the 4-day work week I have been promised now that the technology will make my work, or anyone’s, superfluous. “Do you know about Keynes, a British economist from the 30s?” My colleague asks. “Yes, he too has failed me.”
And why, you wonder, am I telling you all this?
For four reasons:
This week I’ve come across two similar pieces here on substack discussing AI and creativity. One is by
titled Artificial Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence. The other one is a guest post by titled Let's talk about creativity & A.I and published on The Hyphen.Both pieces highlight and stress the value of human creativity and how we must preserve it at all cost, especially when AI models are threatening it and putting into question what being human is in this day and age.
Both pieces elicited a long response from me which I posted in their respective comment section to expand on how AI can also be a force for good, and a good tool for creators, as per the many and insightful conversations I've had over the past year.
This got me thinking that perhaps I should elaborate on this topic myself. After all I do this for a living and for the past four years I’ve been writing about tech and creative industries (first internally, then on LinkedIn, finally on Substack) and I have a publication called
which I refer to as a tech newsletter for non tech people.Actually there is an extra reason: this publication you are now reading does say in its description that it’s also about being human in the age of artificial intelligence. So here I am talking about work in a space I had conceived for non-work related content. I didn’t think that one through.
Let’s talk about AI then: Dramatis Personae
As I’ve learned from my slow read along of War & Peace, if you’re going to tackle a large book, or discussion, you need to set the scene by letting everyone know who are the key players in the story.
When it comes to AI, these are the characters you are expected to meet and how they interact with each other:
👉 Big tech, corporations, and governments which have a private chat where no one else gets invited (unless they're investors)
👉 Regulators who keep sending requests to the chat above but are left on read.
👉 Creators who may be guilting on focusing on weaponising AI instead of on understanding what it can do for them.
👉 Creative tech companies and organisations who are the cool kids having regular, nuanced conversations on challenges and opportunities of AI, but who like GenZ seem to speak a language no one wants to learn and so their voices are mostly heard only within the creative industries circle. Or Tiktok.
👉 Creative Industries are an economic powerhouse. The creative sectors have grown at twice the rate of the wider economy since 2010, generating approximately £115.9 billion for the UK economy -nearly a 6% of the total- and almost 2 million jobs. But they are still seen as the poor cousin when it comes to securing an invitation for the AI Safety Summit that the UK hosted back in November at Bletchely Park.
👉 Tech people talk to tech people. Creative people talk to creative people. The two don't mingle as often as one may think as there is a big silo mentality at work. On tinder terms, the filters they operate on don't lead to what is an otherwise obvious match because creativity is the spark of innovation.
👉 The rest of us common mortals (where I include myself as I've been guilty of this many, many times) who often think "but I'm not a tech/creative" person before we end the conversation on AI with a shrug.
It's easy to see the disconnect in the conversation on AI when you look at all the above. Chinese whispers is a reductive term to capture how disjointed the message that eventually gets to the general public is. Specially when some people are very keen on creating sensationalistic headlines. No wonder that is the message that sticks and that for most people AI is something to be scared of.
There are good reasons for that mindset, I am not going to pretend otherwise or ignore the threats AI can pose (more on that below) if we do not put safety and ethics at the forefront of any conversation on the future of AI.
However, I also feel we’re on the cusp of a historical moment, where we are aware of being in the middle of something that is going to mark a before and after, but we just can’t tell whether it’ll be for good or for worse. Unlike previous technological transformations, AI is disrupting every single aspect of our lives and has made the future highly unpredictable. It is forcing us to redefine our concept of job security and the very essence of what being human means.
But this can be a great opportunity to reconsider which values should be the foundation of the future we want to build and how AI should be developed around them. If we are discussing the importance of creativity, critical thinking, connection, human emotions and how we need to preserve them, why then aren’t we doing anything to incorporate them into every aspect of our lives? Into the choices we make every day, the content we engage with, and the conversations we participate in, the attention we accept social media can steal from us only to sell us something we don’t need.
If we want our world to be more human, we need to ditch the utilitarian mindset we often operate on. It’s not such an obvious thing.
Suffice an example: As I was only the second person to go to university in my family, a relative kept suggesting I studied medicine, law, or engineering as my grades granted me access to anything I wanted and these were careers that could set one up for life. This relative couldn’t understand why on earth I wanted to do English. Easy: given the choice of a secure career or spending time reading, writing and thinking about reading and writing I had no doubts.
Fast forward to our days where AI is making accurate diagnosis, drafting contracts, and developing code therefore automating (or greatly assisting in) many functions in professions that have long been considered strong and stable, to put it à la Theresa May.
For all its technological prowess AI is failing short when it comes to displaying human-like interactions. Can you guess which degrees are highly on demand in the era of AI? English and Philosophy, and by extension the arts and the humanities. Why? Because you can’t replicate human thinking.
This is a long overdue poetic justice of sorts as during the Euro crisis (that saw youth unemployment in Southern Europe skyrocket) humanities degrees were labelled useless and those who studied them were deemed responsible for the dire situation they found themselves in. Instead, practical, useful degrees such as Busines or Economics should be encouraged to prevent future generations to be unemployable.
Because I have limited space here and still many points to make, I invite you to read The Usefulness of the Useless by Nuccio Ordine, an essay published in response to those harsh critics of the humanities during the crisis and which reflects and elaborates on the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and why that is actually quite useful and the basis for innovation and progress.
Having said that, I compare how AI is transforming our lives to that moment in Oppenheimer when Cillian Murphy (only possible winner for the Oscar this year) finally realises the great powers he has unleashed and that are now out of his control. If back in the day one needed a working knowledge of quantum physics (just a bit) to understand anything he talked about, today everyone, techie or not, creative or not, can contribute to the conversation on the future of Artificial Intelligence.
To reference a Saint Motel song, if you've got a pulse and you're breathing, you'll be impacted by AI. It is our responsibility to learn about it so we can have an informed opinion on how we want the technology to evolve, what applications we would like to see from it and based on what we value, and where we should draw red lines.
Artificial Intelligence: the good, the bad, the ugly.
The good of AI is obvious: it can liberate us from repetitive work and it may make the four-day week a reality, which could free up time for us to pursue other activities, from hobbies to spending more quality time with family or caring for a relative without the pressure of having to struggle financially by cutting down hours.
And when it comes to the medical field, AI technology is making groundbreaking progress significantly improve diagnostics but also treatments.
AI can also highly personalise the content and products that you offer or are looking for, therefore contributing to a better consumer experience. It can also help content creators reach a bigger audience (by translating content to another language in real time). It can help you with recipes as you shop for ingredients and can see you in and out of a shop without queuing.
But most importantly it can also offer alternative methods of communication for people with any speaking or hearing impairments thanks to text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology. And people who never thought of themselves as creative can discover the joys of creating impressive images or designs thanks to the same technology.
And thanks to its capacity to analyse large volume of data AI and deep learning models can accelerate our knowledge in ways that we as humans alone could never do, for instance by discovering new materials.
AI has even given us a new Beatles song when half of the band is dead.
The bad is that as AI makes our lives more frictionless and our jobs less repetitive, it can also make us redundant and reduce the opportunities for social interactions. Besides the obvious possibility of being replaced by AI (from actors to Harvard professors) it can be more difficult to secure entry-level jobs in some fields as those tasks are now likely to be automated, making it more challenging for young people to get employment.
Similarly, is such a good thing that AI can do so much for us? Years ago a friend expressed how she wished there were pills one could take to become immediatly fluent in a foreign language. I replied that the beauty of learning a language would be gone, as well as all the surrounding cultural meaning that comes with it and the value we place on having acquired that knowledge through consistent effort.
My friends’s wishes may have come true as AI can now translate content in real time. Will that make us less curious and lazier in the long term? And what about the use of AI at school or universities? And how is generative AI conditioning young people in their career choices?
Equally, the opportunities to connect with others across diverse social backgrounds (hello you heading to the self-checkout to avoid talking to the cashier) are being slowly removed in name of efficiency, contributing to a feeling of loneliness and isolation in an increasingly tech-driven society, which some have rightly refused to resign to.
The rapid tech innovation we’ve experienced since the pandemic comes at a cost: a part of the population sees their lives enhanced at the expense of the other (someone working from home maybe for four days with the same salary and being able to order something online and having the option to get it delivered within an hour vs those delivering it), thus leading to a new model social hierarchy, or techno-feudalism.
The ugly of artificial intelligence is that deepfakes are a real threat (especially to women and children and young people), that synthetic media is on the rise and we can’t be sure of what’s real and what’s not, what poses a serious problem especially in the era where social media, algorithms and AI coexist with major electoral campaigns, world conflicts and fake news.
The ongoing butting of heads between tech companies and regulators about clear and strict safety guidelines on AI, its development and applications, doesn’t help improve things. Take the EU AI Act, for instance. Before the end of 2023 the negotiations were temporarily blocked by France and Germany to ensure there wouldn’t be too much regulation preventing their AI darlings (Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha respectively) from being competitive against US tech giants.
And then there’s the question of how LLM (large language models) are trained with data sets in order to be so powerful and accurate.
Being Human in the Age of AI: Ethics, copyright and model training
In generative AI the output is only as good as the input.
This week I saw a LinkedIn post on how ChatGPT had failed to produced a satisfactory “Find Waldo” scenario. The comments to that post flagged an important point: it wasn’t ChatGPT that wasn’t getting it, it was the prompt that was not specific enough for the chatbot to produce the desired result.
While generative AI can create content -including a play that was staged earlier this year in London - it still needs human input for that content to be what we want . And by that it can be a prompt or human-generated content.
Enter the question of ethics and copyright to train models of AI, which is at the core of the debate on what AI should be able to do and how and the importance of ensuring that AI-generated content is clearly labelled as such and that content used to train AI models (that data) doesn’t infringe any copy rights or, worse still, has been stolen from its original owners or it’s been used against their will.
There is a lot of money going into AI and when that happens one needs to pay attention to what investors are saying because that can shape the rules of the game. VC firm Andreesen Horowitz knows it. Perhaps that’s why they have recently stated that new rules around regulation on the content used to trained AI models could decrease the value of AI investments if companies have to pay for copyrighted data.
And by copyrighted data they are referring to anything from writing to music to human likeness.
Because here’s the thing: large language models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Good, clean data is currently the holy grail everyone is looking for. That’s why writers and newspapers are worried their work can be used to train an AI model. Their unique style, turn of a phrase, the thing that makes them, them can now be replicated by a chatbot and sound like a human. But also photographers and illustrators can easily have their work used without consent. And because most of these data is copyrighted material, AI companies fear regulators may make accessing good data a nightmare -and therefor AI models less competitive- if they place too much emphasis on IP.
But for every creator that fiercely tries to protect their work (or humanity), there is another person that is elated about the possibility of having their content used by others (or likeness to keep appearing in films after death). For every major news outlet banning ChatGPT from using their body of work, there’ll be another signing an agreement with OpenAI to offer it to its users.
You can see the conundrum.
On this note, make sure you block AI training on Substack in your publication details settings.
And now it gets a bit more complicated.
The sofistication of AI chatbots has given rise to companies such as Inflection.ai, founded by Google Deep-Mind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reiff Hoffman.
Inflection.ai’s main product is Pi (short for personal intelligence), a chatbot that can act as a supportive companion you can engage with for more informal conversations and advice as opposed to prompt-based AI bots. My concerns about pushing innovation down this path -and how it can further alienate us from searching human connections- were captured here and then further expanded here as the company raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia.
In a similar vein, Caryn.Ai offers anyone interested the option to have a virtual girlfriend, of which I talked about here again calling for the importance to have a conversation on what future we want to build because it starts now with every choice we make regarding the uses and applications of AI. And since then, we’ve had Meta’s celebrity-lookalike bots, AI-models making more money than I’ll ever will, and AI influencers so real that some people can’t tell they aren’t human.
All these developments are changing what human interactions look like in the age of artificial intelligence and making more necessary than ever to have serious and honest conversations about what being human truly means and what values we are promoting and passing down to future generations with our current behaviours and choices.
The rise of the AI-powered chatbots and human lookalikes doesn’t come as a surprise in a society that is becoming more and more individualistic, where it’s difficult to mantain friendships or keep in touch with them regularly as we step into the overwhelming world of adult responsibilities. Not to mention the isolation into which many were catapulted during the pandemic. We live in a world where people feel more and more disconnected from each other but are too busy with their phones.
What if these new AI applications could help people feel less lonely, especially in old age? What if it made us reflect on the effort and time we are willing to dedicate to nurture human connections? Perhaps not as much as we think despite being horrified by the prospect of anyone prefering to interact with a bot than with us. What if the fear of being replaced by AI could mean that we all ditch superficial online interactions (as the great social media exodus seems to indicate) in favour of a return to spontaneous connection, without a screen between us and another human being?
Let’s go completely crazy while we’re at it: Imagine a world without dating apps.
Demystifying AI for Creativity: “If you’re a creator and are afraid of AI, you’re not very creative”
If you’ve stayed with me until here, congratulations and well done. There are no prizes, but you have my gratitute. Let’s now discuss whether AI can ever replace human creativity.
But first let me go back to the XIX century for a second. When photography appeared many thought the painters were done. They rebelled against it by creating a new artistic movement: impressionism.
What did I tell you at the beginning about creativity being a spark for innovation? Photographers and painters pacifically coexisted for decades. Then smartphones and Instagram arrived and it all started again: Photographers are over, etc. And then AI joined in and last year we saw an AI-generated image win a photography contest.
Have we stopped seeing people wanting to become painters or photographers since the arrival of tech, or have people admiring paintings and photographs? No.
This year the Hollywood strikes got everyone talking about the dangers of AI for creativity as scriptwriters worried about being replaced by AI and actors about never being able to quit acting if their likeness can be reproduced ad libitum. The fact that people have followed this so closely can only be understood if we consider creativity to be the holy grail of human essence, a trait we thought was protected from being pillaged by technology.
Rumour has it there were talks about going on strike before 2020 in order to discuss wages, both for writers and actors, but the pandemic put everything on hold and in the meantime AI changed the tone of the conversation. Especially as the deepfake of Tom Cruise had everyone talking about whether it was actually him entertaning us in the otherwise uneventful lockdown days.
In June last year I was against the use of AI for anything remotely creative. I remember speaking to a colleague in our design team, as they had recently used Midjourney (an AI programme for image creation) for a campaign we had launched, and I was hoping he’d tell me he was not so thrilled by that. To my surprise he was wildly enthusiastic about it.
And then in subsequent conversations with other creators, especially in immersive storytelling, virtual production, entertainment, music, and filmmaking I could see they all shared that optimism. As someone said at one of the many events I took part in about AI and Creativity last year: “If you’re a creator and fear AI can replace you, you’re not very creative”.
AI could help people creat more inclusive stories, to take ownership of the narrative, to become playful and experiment with tools that allowed them to design something despite the lack of artistic talent.
In September last year I met Miles Fisher at a roundtable we hosted to discuss the film sector, in the context of the strikes and how they had impacted the indutry, and many of my prejudices about the use of AI in entertainment were challenged after listening to him. I was seated next to him and learned that the two of us have an English degree in common. He must be a decent person, I thought. What transpired from that event is that he is above all a very creative person with a very sensible outlook on things as well as a passion for entertainment.
But the revelations last year didn’t stop there. At an event I attended as part of the AI Fringe the moderator shared how her father, a 75 year old man who had always loved writing for fun, struggled a lot with plot development. Thanks to ChatGPT he can now prompt the app for inspiration for plot ideas that he can play with and develop further.
All these people working at the intersection of creativity and technology felt that AI could help and expand the possibilities of what human creativity can achieve, but it can’t do it on its own and the results need the multilayered human subtext that generative AI doesn’t posses on its own. In other words: the output is only as good at the input. If we were asked to come up with a Find Waldo image, to go back to a previous example, we know the purpose is to make it difficult to find Waldo, not to put him in the centre of the picture.
AI has great potential to allow creators to reach new frontiers in storytelling, visual effects or animation for engaging experiences -ABBA Voyage being the perfect example of this - as well as to design and deliver highly personalised content, but the nuance, the tone, the emotional reaction that those experiences will elicit can only come from a human. AI is just a vehicle, a tool.
There are many people championing creators and the value of their work (and the importance of intellectual property and copyright) in the era of AI, and having inspiring conversations that are challenging preconceptions on AI and its perceived threat. Most of them agree on one thing: AI is an enhancer and not a substitute of human creativity.
While Creative Industries were shunned from joining the AI Safety Summit conversation at Bletchley Park back in November, the AI Fringe organised a number of public events across the UK to open the conversation on the future of AI to the general public.
As part of the AI Fringe, I had the grat pleasure to moderate a panel on AI and Creativity at the British Library. I was joined by a fantastic line-up of inspiring creators: Molly Smitten-Downes, Lawrence Essex and Justin Hackney, each of them bringing a unique and insightful perspective on how artificial intelligence is impacting their work and how they can explore its creative potential to foster collaboration. We covered a lot of ground in 30 minutes (starting at 1:04:00) so if you have the time, please watch our chat in the video below as the conversation touched on how AI could actually allow people be more creative, value original content more and free up time for artists to focus on the creative process.
Prior to my session, Lara Carmona (we both joked it was a requirement to have the same surname to be part of this event), Director of Policy and Engagement at Creative UK, moderated an engaging panel that discussed in depth the potential impact of AI models on creators and their IP rights.
You can find a recording of both sessions below.
You and AI: Be the change you want to see
While I was on the stage I kept an eye on the audience, who looked surprised as we proceeded to demystify the use of AI for creators.
I recognised in them that past version of me that was hoping to hear from my colleague how bad AI was only to be disappointed. Like me many of these people in the auditorium were probably there expecting to confirm their bias.
That’s why it is important we all become involved in the conversation about AI - whether we are for or against, techie or not, creative or not. You just have to be human. The wider range of voices discussing how AI is impacting their lives and their work, the greater the influence we can have in shaping the future we want to build and how we can ensure that AI is a force for good that works for us. Not the other way around.
Because let’s be clear on one thing: AI is here to stay so we may as well learn about it and educate ourselves on the current challenges and opportunities it presents for the future of work, human relations and creativity. And for that we must be willing to go beyond the sensationalistic headlines.
This post is my humble attempt at touching on some of the key questions to bear in mind when it comes to AI, hopefully in an accessible way, but for every point I’ve made I could have written a separate essay focusing only on it. You don’t have to become an expert on AI -I’m not one!- simply be curious about how our world is evolving as a result of it and in which direction you’d like it to go.
Get involved in the conversation
The Society of Authors is conducting a survey to help inform their views on AI and they are asking writers, illustrators and translators to take part. You can complete the survey here.
For those based in the UK you may want to explore these networks, or sign up to their newsletters to keep an eye on their upcoming events, which you may be able to join as a non-member:
Key tech events in London with a focus on AI
London Tech Week - This is London’s landmark tech event gathering attendees from across the globe. It offers different streams with a focus on blockchain, crypto, creativity, AI, and the metaverse (last year I moderated a panel on the future of VR and AR). It is possible to register for a complimentary pass that grants access to most stages. The 2024 edition will be running from 10th -14th June and hosted at Olympia.
AI Summit London - Running in paralled to London Tech Week. Some passes for London Tech Week include access to the AI Summit. Alternatively it is possible to register for a separate pass, although it is an expensive ticket.
CogX Festival - Another landmark AI and tech event taking place in September in London. CogX usually offers early bird tickets at a discounted prices to attend the 3-day conference on how AI is transforming the future of work, education, and climate.
You can also follow the AI Fringe on LinkedIn or Twitter (@AISummitFringe) for upcoming announcements on public events which are mostly free to join.
Further reading:
The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy - on AI and Creativity
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman - on how technology is disrupting how we love, eat, reproduce and die in the future.
Two movies about AI:
I’m your Man (Ich Bin dein Mensch) - What if you could build your perfect partner thanks to AI and have it delivered to you? Directed by Maria Schrader and starring Maren Eggert and Dan Stevens this is a beautiful, compassionate and thought-provoking film that will challenge any preconceived ideas you may have about AI.
The Imitation Game - Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the father of modern AI, and set at Bletchely Park during WWII while he was trying to break the Enigma code. A great movie that pays homage to an innovator whose achievements were ostracised for decades due to his homosexuality. The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national centre for AI and data research.
Thank you for reading Abroad
Abroad is an independent publication about cultural identity and belonging, languages, the love of books, music, films, creativity, life in London, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence. If you have enjoyed reading this piece, or any other content available on this publication, please recommend it to others who may like it as well.
