Vox: “Artificial intelligence has long been hailed as a great “equalizer” of creativity, finally putting the ability to create art in all of its myriad forms into the hands of the tech-savvy. Not a creative person? Not an issue. “The reason we built this tool is to really democratize image generation for a bunch of people who wouldn’t necessarily classify themselves as artists,” said the lead researcher for DALL-E, which turns text prompts into images. Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, wrote in his book that generative AI will one day account for 95 percent of the work that companies hire creative professionals to do: “All free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.” Or, as another AI startup founder put it: “So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows.” But it is a problem for actual artists, and for anybody who cares and thinks deeply about the words, images, and sounds we consume every day. With any promise of disruption comes the reasonable fear that its replacement will be worse, both for the creative professionals who rely on artmaking for their livelihoods and for people who enjoy reading well-written works, who take pleasure in thoughtful visual art, who watch movies not solely to be entertained but because of the surprising, life-affirming, or otherwise meaningful directions a good film might go. Should we take seriously the artistic vision of someone who considers “pooping rainbows” the pinnacle of creativity?

The wrinkle in AI executives’ plot to supplant human creativity is that so far, consumer AI tools are not very good at making art. Generative AI creates content based on recognizing patterns within the data it was trained on, using statistics to determine what the prompter is hoping to get out of it. But if art is more meaningful beyond the images or words that comprise it or the money that it makes, what good is an amalgam of its metadata, divorced from the original context?…”