Therapeutic Outlet - AI Will Not Replace You!

Show Notes

Summary

In this episode of the Art Against Mental Illness podcast, host Alex Loveless introduces a new, less structured episode format called therapeutic outlets. He engages in a more relaxed, wide-ranging discussion, focusing on the impact of AI, especially in the arts and creative industries. Alex shares concerns about AI’s role in content creation and job displacement, reflecting from his experience as a data professional. He emphasizes that true creativity involves choice and context, arguing that AI lacks the genuine creativity found in human-led artistic processes.

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Notes

The film scripted by AI that I reference is called The Last Screenwriter. I’ve not seen it but it sounds like all the fun.

If you want to understand more about how I use AI in my artistic process, see this blog post.

For absolute transparency this transcript was created by OpenAI’s transcription service Whisper and then tidied up and corrected by me manually. The episodes description was created by ChatGPT. These are the only times that AI was used in the creation of this episode and it’s one of the general use cases that I approve of.

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being.

So this episode I’m going to introduce a new format that I’m going to use from time to time. My usual episodes are scripted and well thought through in advance and for these ones and I’m going to call them my therapeutic outlets. I’m going to be a little bit more wide ranging, a little bit more chatty and ranty and cover some aspects of art and mental health that are perhaps a little bit wider in context and a little bit more of the moment. And this episode I’m going to talk about AI.

Now everyone’s talking about AI at the moment, specifically around generative AI and the term you’ll have heard used most frequently is ChatGPT which is OpenAI’s large language model chatbot. But more broadly speaking there are generative AI models and products that cover things like image and video generation, a whole host of language based things and more increasingly into things like you know life sciences for things like medication drug generation. Effectively anything that can be created and predicted, people are using generative AI as a shortcut to being able to generate much more content much more cheaply.

The jobs that are being more generally affected by this and the vocations and the pastimes that are being more affected by this right now are very clearly within the arts and within the creative communities and the creative vocations and particularly and most critically within anyone who works with the written words and then secondarily but coming very closely up behind visual artists, visual designers and creators. This creates a very scary environment I think for anyone in those industries. Now we’re going to talk a lot about that, I’m going to talk a lot about that, but I should also point out that those are not the only industries that are suffering here.

It’s worth a brief reiteration of my circumstances. I’m a data analyst, a data scientist based in the UK and I got my redundant last year from my job and have since been trying to set up my own consultancy doing data analytics and or to find particularly contract roles but at this point any job that pays doing what I do which is pretty well paid and a pretty privileged job to be doing and I’ve thus far in the last six months since October last year I’ve failed to do so and eight months I guess that is now. That’s been very baffling to me and there’s a couple of things at play here. One of them is obviously the UK economy is very much in the doldrums at the moment and businesses aren’t really investing in anything or taking any risks and to AI. Now I thought that given my skills that I know how to build AI’s, I can build you a neural network, I can train you a machine learning algorithm to build a model to do all sorts of things in terms of language processing and we’ll come back to my generative art and a few other things as well but I thought I was safe from the potential coming storm in terms of jobs being lost to AI but it seems that isn’t the case and so I find myself under attack from both sides both from my up until now has been my main income stream in on the data site site and on my most hobby past time stuff with with regards to art. Yeah I was very very surprised by this and I think that the reason it’s happening is because businesses think that AI is easy because you can go and type into ChatGPT please write me a python script to analyze my data, please write me some copy for my website, please build me a prototype that shows a chatbot for my customers and prototyping this stuff out is very very easy and it’s very easy for someone who is not technical to look at that and go well job done and if you work in the technical arena at all you’re on my side of things you’ll realize very quickly that it isn’t that simple but as it stands right now a lot of businesses believe it’s that simple and haven’t discovered that it isn’t there’s a you know there’s a whole bunch of technical infrastructure and skills required into scaling these things up and to handling all the things like the fact that they hallucinate all the time and also things like data security and privacy GDPR that type of thing. So I think my industry on that side is probably going to pick up a bit but it’s a bit late for me and I’m really struggling to make ends meet.

I think a lot about this sort of stuff and I think a lot about what people can do just by typing things into a into a prompt and what that means for what I do in general and I’ve come to quite a few conclusions and I’ve still got some open questions but fundamentally what I’ve realized and what many other people particularly on the business side of things haven’t realized yet is that the making of the thing be that a piece of code to for a chatbot or a beautiful artwork of some sunflowers the trick here isn’t in the actual making of it the trick is in the whole process and you’ve heard me bang on about the process but it’s it’s the way of thinking it’s the choice to do one thing over the other it’s the understanding of what quality is and it’s the application of that to any given vocation and so you can think about the fact that they’re the first fully a AI scripted film is currently struggling to find a distributor but I don’t know what it’s called but it’s coming out apparently it’s very well made film that makes a very specific point because actually getting ChatGPT to create a script for a film well it did create a script and it created a very convincing one but it didn’t create a very good one and I know the argument is that well it didn’t create a good one now but you know was that done on gpt 3.5 or 3 or was gpt 4 capable of that or maybe gpt 5 will be but if you think that the whole thing about a movie or an artwork or or even a python script that the substance of that was the thing itself then you’ve completely misunderstood the creative process and it works on both sides of things here.

I consider coding a creative process as much as I consider painting a creative process at the beginning of of my journey when I’m trying to write some python that does something I don’t know what how I want it to do that I don’t know all the things I need it to I just think I’ve got this thing I need doing a job that needs done and I I figure I can I can automate that because I don’t want to do it myself and I can do that myself because I’m I’m a very proficient python developer what I always find is that when I’m trying to write a prompt to tell it to write the code for me two things go wrong one I don’t really know what I want at the beginning I don’t know all the things that I need it to do I don’t know what I need the inputs to be and the outputs to be I don’t know how I want it to look I sort of find that out as I’m coding it where you start off with a little kernel of code and you code out a bit and you try something and you fail and you go I’ll do this thing and I’ll do it like this and it produces an output and you go no that’s not really what I wanted I thought that’s what I wanted but it isn’t so what if I tweak it this way and that way and you you feel your way through the development process as if it were a creative process and the second thing is is if I can get it to a point where I where I know what to describe where I know what I want it never writes it in the way that I want it written it never does what I want and I found myself creating system prompts and seed prompts very very detailed descriptions of how I want things done before I can even get to the point of of getting it to write any code so it’ll write it in the way that I want it or in the way that I think is sensible and I sort of given up I’ll use it bits and pieces here and there to do what we call boilerplate code the really basic stuff that is a bit boring and a bit laborious and no one really likes doing it’s really good at that type of stuff as long as you know what you want.

Anyway this is an arts podcast so what does all this have to do with the arts well I don’t see the process as different when I paint a picture I don’t I very rarely know what I’m going to end up with I sort of feel my way through it and I think if you’re someone who’s going to paint a picture that’s going to be you know very very well thought through and considered and might take you months if not years to create you will recognize that the process that you went through to paint that final picture was only a tiny little bit of the overall process which includes all of your life and all of the way things you do and the way you think about things that the things that you chose the paints the colors the composition the subjects the the materials the the type of painting you use the the size everything were part of a continuum in your creative journey and the the reason you create pictures in the way that you do paintings and the way that you do is because of who you are and that journey and and all the choices you made at that point in time which were very much influenced by things around you like constraints of money or ideas that you had and people that you met it’s not simply the final piece that you started and then at some point like you finished it and you were like robotically working on it for eight hours a day and then it was done.

It doesn’t work like that, no creative process does. In fact that that type of process this idea that things come out of the ether perfectly formed is antithetical to the creative process. It simply isn’t part of it. There’s no such thing as that stroke of genius. There’s no such thing as the light bulb. People might have intuitive leaps, but you have intuitive leaps all the time. That is creativity. Sometimes they’re big and you notice them and sometimes they’re little. Sometimes you end up creating something that’s world changing and everyone thinks well there was that one creative leap that that person made that one stroke of inspiration which is nonsense. There is never that situation, it doesn’t happen that way. That’s not how creativity works. You’re always standing on the shoulders of giants there anyway, right. Einstein created relativity off the back of a whole bunch of work that had been done before him by equally brilliant people. He just happened to put the lego bricks together in a certain way that brought a whole bunch of things together that made a lot of things to make sense that didn’t make sense before.

So firstly there’s no sense that large language models or any of these image generation models can be creative if you think they can you fundamentally misunderstand what these things are. They are simply probability machines they simply say given this input what is the most probable output that the user would expect. What is the next character what is the next word. They contain no knowledge. That’s why they get facts wrong all the time there’s no actual knowledge in there. There’s just probability of characters. There’s not even characters because the model internal to that uh that particular model is is just mathematical it’s just a whole bunch of vectors. There is no knowledge now there is information and that information is compressed and it is uh made fuzzy and it is it is placed within a probabilistic framework. But there is no creativity in there there’s no intelligence and there’s no volition. It may look like there is but there absolutely fundamentally isn’t. Generative AI models cannot be and will not be creative not anytime soon, not ever. So to say there’s no such thing as a creative artificial intelligence does that exist now I don’t believe so. Will it exist in the future I don’t know I can simply say for certain that what we’ve got now isn’t that and cannot possibly be.

So what do these models and these approaches mean to art? So at the most basic sense we can say that you can go to DALL-E or Stable Diffusion or one of these commercial generative image models and say make me a picture of badger juggling some mini cheeses while whistling and balancing on a ball and then do it in the style of Van Gogh or something. And you’ll get something good or bad and if you get good at the prompting you can probably produce something quite amazing and some of the gen AI art I’ve seen it is very impressive indeed and very detailed and quite creative. But where did that creativity come from? It did not come from DALL-E, it came from the person who prompted it. The person who prompted it was using it as an artistic tool. And they either had good ideas or bad ideas, they either gave it good prompts or bad prompts and, they had a good vision or a bad vision. And they produced art whether you like it or not. It’s either good or bad art. It doesn’t really matter how they created it.

So you might think well that’s lazy and cheating and I’ve spent decades teaching myself how to paint and it takes them half an hour to do. And I would argue well that’s not really the right way to think about this. Firstly stop devaluing your art. Stop doing that. You’ve produced something physical and amazing. And even if it’s digital only it has your fingerprints all over it, in a way that the AI art can’t possibly have. And secondarily it’s not just about the things that you produce. It’s about the ideas and the techniques and the approach and so on that goes into making something like this. And I’m afraid you just simply can’t encode all of that into a piece of generative art. And so if you went off as being the brilliant fine artist that you are and started using generative AI to produce art, I guarantee you produce much better art than the people who have just picked it up over the last few weeks and are producing something that looks very impressive. And I think that people can see the difference.

But for me it’s also somewhat beside the point. Because for me art is about communication art is about being able to make a connection with someone either directly or remotely and through time and through space. And the most important thing about the art is not the artwork itself it’s not the piece of music or the painting or whatever. It is the human context in which that sits. The history, the placement, the artist itself, the context of where it is being consumed and the taste of the person that is consuming it. And the historical context within which it sits at that moment in time and whether it’s in a gallery or someone’s living room. And all these things matter and they all are human connections and art is about humanity. Art is about distilling culture, and the idea that that can simply be replaced is nonsensical.

Another thing to think about is the fact that very few of these AI artworks are the first attempt. They’ll often go through lots and lots of different ideas and many different iterations with many different prompts. And that person who made that still had to choose. They still had to choose which one was the best and they still had to choose what went in it and how they described it to the AI. And that in itself is the essence of the artistic process. Especially in the visual arts. You have to choose something. You have to choose a theme, you have to choose a subject, you have to choose a way of approaching that. And then you have to select the best one.

And so you’ve made a bunch of sketches for an oil painting you’re going to do. And you did a few different versions of it and you’re going to choose the best one. And have you chose the best one? Maybe you have maybe you haven’t. If you’re a good artist one of the things you learn is to develop your artistic eye. One of the things you learn is to be able to choose the best output the best version at that moment in time, for the job that you want doing.

So there was a creative process in terms of how that person came about making that piece of art. And the difference between a good piece of AI art and a bad piece of AI art is still choice. And that’s why we have a pile of bricks in in the Tate Modern. That didn’t take a lot of technique. What that person did was choose. They chose to put a pile of bricks. Tracy Emin chose to put her bed in a gallery. Marcel Duchamp knew exactly what he was doing when he put the urinal in the gallery. And the person who went and urinated on it didn’t realize that they were contributing to the art. He knew exactly what he was doing. And this is the whole point, art is as much about choice and context as it is anything else. So to rule AI art out is…it’s a bit short-sighted.

But I do understand the paranoia. Now it’s also worth noting that I use AI in my art myself. I don’t use the likes of DALL-E. I am a data professional. I do know how to build these things and so a lot of my art involves an element of AI in it. What I have is a homegrown neural network I use algorithms that have been built by other people. But I deploy them in my own specific way. I’ve written my own code. I’ve got quite a complex body of code that does what I want.

So the way it works is that I have what’s called an autoencoder whose only job is to reproduce what went into it. And in this case it’s an image so I encode an image into a mathematical form, I pass it into the autoencoder and then I ask it to recreate that image. But along the way I constrain it so it doesn’t have enough brain power, enough memory to do it properly. And I put lots of images into it and say “right, I want you to recreate all of these images” knowing full well that it can’t. And what it does is it mixes them up. And it mixes them up in lots of weird, exotic, crazy ways that I find so exciting it gets me so motivated and excited. It makes thousands of these and I’d say a good 60 percent of them pretty much delete straight away, of those 40 I have to sort through them individually and look at ones and which ones do I like, which ones are just really actually a reproduction of the original, which ones have been mixed up in an interesting way and which ones make sense in that context. And it’s a choice. The computer created the images but I chose how that machine works, I chose the images that are going to go into it, and I choose which outputs I select And then I take those I scale them up and I put them on canvases and then I embellish them by hand. I put the colour into it manually. I choose which bits of the images to use how to scale them up, and what to do with them. And all along there you’ve got a whole string of artistic choices. And that for me is a really fascinating interesting exciting process. But the AI in that context for me is just another tool part of a long long creative process that I use to get to where I want. And it helps me ideate. It helps break me out of modes of thinking and reproducing things too directly or too literally. It gives me all sorts of ideas and then those ideas bleed into stuff that doesn’t involve AI. Suddenly I’m using the things I’ve learned from that AI to apply to stuff that’s enriched my imagination and helping all of my art and also every part of my life.

I think there’s a lot of people particularly in the arts worried about what AI represents. Unfortunately the one thing that ChatGPT is good at is writing solid copy. Now it writes bad English in the sense that when you ask it to write something it often uses weird word choices that I wouldn’t use. But it writes exceptionally good English so it is good at checking someone else’s work if you know how to wield it properly. So there’s a lot of jobs that are going to be lost in that area there’s a lot of jobs that are going to be lost in terms of people who design logos for small businesses or or website design. And these sorts of things that people aren’t going to be massively choosy if you if you’re starting a plumbing business and you just want a logo that says Joe Blog’s plumbing you know you’re not going to worry yourself too much that it doesn’t it’s not iconic like the Nike swoosh. You just want something that works and unfortunately there’s a whole group of people out there who have made their jobs to do that type of thing and they’re now going to find themselves without a job. And this is terrible. I think probably it’s out of the scope of this particular rant but I do want to talk a lot about how those clearly creative, brilliant people, a lot of them are going to find themselves out of work like me, suffering from mental health problems because of it, who need to channel their creative instincts somewhere. And we need to support these people. The government needs to support them and us as the wider creative community needs to support them. And fundamentally that’s partly why this podcast exists and so that’s definitely a subject I’m going to come back to, but I think it needs a lot more discussion than I’m going to be able to give it here. I just want to stick with the more fine art side of things for the rest of this this episode, which I promise won’t be too much longer.

This side of the artistic community is going to suffer a lot less and a lot less than people are worried about could possibly happen. If someone wants something generic on their wall then they’re already going to have that because Ikea has been providing that stuff for a very very long time as do many other high street or readily available shops will sell you some cheap generic wall candy for your home or your business. Nothing’s changed there, but the people who really invest in art invest in the artist they invest in the human and they often invest in actual real things. I’m not going to get dragged into NFTs and on that whole ridiculousness here, although I do have a lot to say on it. I’m not going to say it now but I think broadly speaking most of these people are interested in something that feels tangible and that can include digital art. And I think people can tell the difference between something that was created with a human in the loop rather than just a few prompts to to DALL-E. And I think that people care I think it’s important to them to know that there was a human involved in that. And so we’re going to get more and more businesses and industries that spring up around the validation, almost like a kite mark for creative products, so you can guarantee that it was made by a human.

Something i learned the hard way coming back into the art world after many years of being away was that as an artist you’ve got to be out there. People want to know about the artist, they want to be invested in that person, they want to feel like they’re connecting with a real human. And you’ve got to be out there on social media, you’ve got to be out there in the world world. And a lot of people who are buying art are on a journey with you as an artist and other artists like you and want to be on that journey. It’s a high consideration purchase that they want to be high consideration. It’s like buying your new car if you’re really into cars. You really love the process. I mean, I hate the process of buying cars. It fills me with absolute horror. But I’ve got no interest in cars. But if you were a car enthusiast the idea that you’re on a journey to buy your next car is the most enthusing experience ever. And I think people are like that with art. And I think that broadly speaking that maps on to music and the performance art, photography you name it. It’s a different type of journey they might be a different type of punter but it’s really the same thing. These people are on a journey with that playwright, they’re on a journey with that…I mean very much so in music people very very very invested in recording artists and that’s not going to change. People’s consumption mechanisms might get slightly different but they’re not going to change.

And I also think that from a very much from a visual arts perspective it’s I think it’s going to lead to a boom in physical art because people know when you look at that painting close up then you can see the little globules of paint and the little imperfections that are in there, and the texture on the canvas or the paper. And you can see that that was not made by a machine and if someone decided that they could build this machine that could could do this I don’t think anyone would want it because people want to know that it’s still attached to a human. That they can see that this was a physical artwork made with human hands and that they can go and see that human or talk to them or send them an email or see them on Youtube or Instagram. And it’s important that’s vitally important to the whole process for them as art consumers and that’s their therapy.

You know I talk about art therapy on this podcast is very much from process of being the artist and making the art because that’s who I am that’s where I am and that’s what matters the most to me. But I’m an art consumer as well. And the more people will see art as a therapeutic outlet purely as a consumer than I’ll actually like me. And as more as the world changes people find themselves left at a short end loose end sorry because the work isn’t out there because the machines are taking over they’re going to take solace in art. They’re going to take solace in creating art and they’re going to take solace in in consuming art and they don’t want stuff made by a machine. They’re going to forgive you and perhaps laud you for having some AI in the process, and maybe I’m wrong about that, but I think so because they’ll still be able to see the signature of a human there. What they don’t want is something that had no effort put into it and no imagination and no talent. And if you think you can pick up a paintbrush or or turn on your computer and fire up DALL-E and believe that you can automatically make good art then then you’re off your rocker.

Art isn’t just about technique, it’s about ideas it’s about selecting the right thing, it’s about understanding what people want, it’s about tapping into your emotional state, tapping into zeitgeist, in culture. It’s about reading the room it’s about understanding what’s happening around you and channeling that into something that has some meaning to someone. And if you’re what you’ve done is you’ve created something in 20 minutes that it has no meaning it’s just you messing around, humans who care about art are going to see that and go “I can’t connect with that, that’s not art because it gives me nothing, I get nothing from it”, it’s like just looking at might as well be looking at blank canvas which in essence will probably be more creative.

So I don’t think that the arts as a whole is going to suffer and I start to think we might be at the on the cusp of a renaissance because people will need it more than ever. In a world that’s going to crap people take solace in art, and many of the antidotes to the problems in the world are in part something that art and the community of art can help solve, by bringing people together, by spreading ideas, by challenging authority, by spreading beauty over hate and despair and division, by creating unity and love and beauty. And I don’t take those I’m not the sort of person that spouts all of this type of those types of words lightly. I don’t like using them liberally because they’ve been overused and almost feel empty, but they do mean what they mean, and I know what I mean them to mean right now. I mean the art creates connection and it creates beauty and it creates the opposite of beauty as well and that’s exactly what it’s there to do.

And that’s what we need to keep doing and so if you’re making art now and you’re worried about what’s going to happen I would urge you to not be worried, I would urge you to learn more about what AI art means understand it, understand that it’s not your enemy or your foe and maybe you’ll find something there that you can use. But if not that’s fine too, the world still needs you. The world still wants you to be there creating. So don’t worry immerse yourself in it if that if you’re at all that way inclined. Don’t worry if you’re not it’s irrelevant you can still do what you do. And I think it’s going to become more valuable not less you know.

Just think about the fact that when photography first came about in the late 19th century people thought that that meant the pictorial arts were dead. That painting was a finished art. Because why would i want to paint a picture of that woman there when I can just take a photo of her. And to an extent it sort of did kill off the strongly pictorial representational art to the to the absolute benefit of the art world as a whole. Initially the photography world was aping the classical art world and then the classical art world moved into impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, abstract expressionism into all forms of mad abstraction and the art world and the art discipline got richer because of it. And now we’re coming back to it and you know I can get a high definition picture of anything I like, I can buy a really amazing camera and get the best picture you could ever imagine, but here I am still making paintings and tens of thousands of millions of people are, and it’s not getting less because it’s not about the finished product, it’s about the context and the culture and the process.

And this is what I want you all to understand I want you to feel comfortable and happy and I want you to do more of what you do and I want you to be not afraid of AI and to work with it or not just keep doing what you’re doing. And keep remembering that art is about therapy it’s about connection it’s about love and beauty and to not get distracted by these other things because it’d be the worst thing in the world if you felt this meant you needed to give up and one less person was doing this and one less person was getting the benefit from it themselves but one less person is spreading the benefit of it to the wider world.

So that’s my rant was that a rants impassioned speech I’m going to stop talking now. I will be back next time with something a little less animated and a little bit more scripted and I’ll do more episodes like this in the future because I’ve actually quite enjoyed doing it. And I hope that you enjoyed it too but feel free to tell me if you didn’t.

As ever if you want to help me keep ranting into the microphone like this then I have a Patreon account that you can go and there are three plans plans for as little as one dollar and some more expensive plans that will see you receiving a piece of personalized artwork made by me. That supports this podcast and me as an artist. Otherwise follow me on Instagram @alexmloveless, Facebook AlexLovelessArtist. You’ll find me on most of the social media platforms. I have a blog. Sign up for my newsletter alexloveless.co.uk. Keep supporting me, keep listening, tell your friends, tell your family tell your dog, and I’ll see you next time.