Today on the 5: The CTO of OpenAI recently made some comments on the necessity of some creative jobs that got a lot of people upset. While I remain fairly neutral on AI as a tool, statements like these reinforce the reality that it is the people who control these tools that are the real threat to creative individuals.
Ozone Nightmare
It's Not The Tools, It's The People
Welcome to your daily five for Tuesday June 25th, 2024. I have said more than a few times that when it comes to generative AI tools that I am largely neutral on them, because I neither think that they are going to elevate humanity to the next level of whatever. And I also don't think they're going to become Skynet and destroy everything. But I've realized I have to refine that particular stance to say that neutrality is specific to the tools themselves, because every time, or certainly more recently when some of the people in charge of these companies open their mouths, oh boy, does it pinpoint where the real problem with this stuff is? It's not the technology itself, but as usual, it's the people in charge of it. So the most recent flare up was over comments by Mira Marati, I think I pronounced that correctly, who is the CTO of OpenAI, and she was giving comments on what she thought generative AI's place in creative spaces were. And she said many things, and you can read all her comments if you want to go watch the video, but specifically what a lot of people are upset over, and a very, very important phrase, or I should say paragraph within her comments was this, quote, "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place." I really believe that using it, meaning AI, as a tool for education and creativity will expand our intelligence, and people got very upset. Now, the second part of that sentence, well, that's just blanket marketing material. You could say that about anything, honestly, in terms of tools. But that first part, where she's talking about, and she mentions something about the quality of the content as well, so the whole quote has been chopped up all over the place, but essentially, what it boiled down to was this individual saying that, well, the thing about our tools are that they're going to take people who are doing a poor job of what they were doing, and they're going to get rid of them because they really should have never been doing it in the first place. And this way, you'll have something that'll make high quality content, and you don't have to worry about paying a person who wasn't that great to begin with. And this betrays, because I looked at Marathi's background as far as I could find in public information, no creative background whatsoever. She is, from all accounts, and highly skilled, very intelligent mathematician who is a fundamental part of building open AI's generative AI tool. So this is not meant to say I think she's a stupid woman, or she doesn't know anything or that she's a fool, but her experience and her expertise is in a specific area, which is mathematics, something I will freely admit I'm a dummy in. This would be like me saying that I think that mathematicians can be replaced by people who can draw numbers because honestly, I don't think all that many of them are good at adding things anyway. What would I know about mathematics? I'm an art school dummy. I know about drawing, not adding things together, outside of like two and two. So this is a common sentiment, and I think this is where the real concern of people should be. Not whether the tools are putting six fingers on a person's hand, all that stuff will get settled. That's nitpicking. This, these people, people who have no respect, or I think even concept of what creativity is, of what creative expression is, they're the people we should be concerned about. Not the tools. The tools, it's just like a hammer. You can build a house. You can kill somebody. Gendered AI is no different. The tools themselves are not the real problem. It's the intent and the worldviews of those who are in charge of steering them because when somebody says something like that, oh, I don't think, you know, we're only going to replace people who are crappy at their jobs. That infers that there is a objective metric that apparently this person thinks they can apply or people at this company can apply on what is good and what is bad. And the minute you start hearing that type of phrasing and that type of subjective interpretation of art, you should be worried. Art, the power, the thing that is wonderful about art is that it can be different things to different people. And somebody can look at a Jackson-Palk painting and be moved emotionally and wonderfully by it. And then I can look at it and I don't understand what anybody else is seeing in it. But that doesn't mean I don't think it should exist. It doesn't mean I'm the judge of whether it's good or not. It's not. But I'm not that person. That's what art does so well is it can speak to different people in different ways. Art can actually be any number of things to any number of people, whether it's good or bad. It can inspire discussion even in its perhaps poor quality. And so when I hear this type of phrasing, when I hear people saying like this, it just makes me focus on the fact that it's the people behind these tools that are the real concern point, not the tools themselves. Not only wrong, the tools have their own issues, but they are minor compared to the people behind them. They're intent, they're goals, and they're outlook on what creativity is. That's the thing you should be concerned about. So focus on the right thing. In this case, it's the people later.