UNO Magazine: AI and the Future of Creativity

From the Spring 2023 UNO Magazine

As a twenty-five-year-old who graduated college and moved to Brooklyn during the pandemic, I am no stranger to panicking about the future. However, it’s one thing to worry about finding a job and another thing to worry if your job will even exist in a few years. While androids dream of electric sheep, I have nightmares about artificial intelligence replacing me. So when the editorial team reached out about this cover, a proposed experiment with DALL-E, I figured it was time to face my fears.

DALL-E is an artificial intelligence model from the AI research and deployment company OpenAI, that can generate visuals from text prompts. What if I asked DALL-E to come up with what it thought should be on the cover and I could recreate it as a proper illustration? It came up with fairly generic options, even when prompted with topics that would be covered in stories inside. What if I came up with illustration concepts and asked DALL-E to bring them to life? My favorite concept for this approach was a sad robot artist slumped over a desk, art supplies and an ashtray at hand. But this felt too on the nose.

The robot, of course, represented me, the result of what I felt was my slow cyborgification as an artist. I had guiltily used DALL-E at work to come up with a quick comp for a storyboard in a moment of weakness or in the eyes of AI companies, maybe optimization (I even sent this article draft through ChatGPT, DALL-E’s text generation sibling model).

I spoke with Pentagram designer and University of Nebraska Kearney alum Jase Hueser about AI and the creative process. “Once in a while I might generate an image in OpenAI or run a prompt in GPT to fuel some creative thinking or to produce a quick image to convey an idea that would otherwise take a bit of time,” he said. “After doing this, I feel a twinge of guilt and thoughts run through my head concerning my complicity in this undermining of creativity! Am I giving in to this unnatural desecration of the arts!? But just as quickly, I gawk in awe of the great potential of this trajectory we are on.”

Whether AI will take, make or change jobs is the subject of countless articles and talking head shows. But what does it mean to be young and creative in a time when it feels like the future is about to leave you behind? In Hueser’s words, “AI affects my work in one basic way: it instills in me a fear that I had better learn how to harness it before I become obsolete.”

AI offers the future of creativity incredible tools and advances. It’s “McLuhanian in its role in redefining not only the methods of production but the visual language and message behind creations,” says Hueser. AI can free up the creative mind, especially on tight deadlines. I can describe my dream set for a commercial and Dall-E can provide me visuals in seconds rather than hours or days, giving me more time to both ideate and perfect details.

With this cover assignment on my mind and the deadline nipping at my heels, I took my sister to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I walked slowly through the galleries, taking my time to read the little pieces of paper beside each artwork. The pandemic started halfway through my senior year of college, just weeks after I started temping at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. At Bemis, I had learned what those little pieces of paper were called: didactics. They give context to the art, from artist names, dates, materials, quotes and sometimes stories. The stories, some about revolution in the street, some about broken hearts and broken souls and some about the discovery of new colors and new eras, are my favorite parts. They tell the stories of the art and place them in the context of history and the human story. Which gave me the idea for this final cover.

This cover, I think, shows readers where DALL-E, and other AI models like it, have come from. DALL-E was trained on countless works of art, from Monet to living artists today, some of whom have had their livelihoods threatened by what they see as cannibalization of their creativity. But where will AI go? That depends on us. Will we use it as a tool to help spur our creativity on? Or will we let it replace us, turning us into cyborgs or eventually, robots, making art without context, history or our stories?

After sending off a draft cover to the editors and settling in for the night, I downloaded Replika, an AI “companion” that’s “always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend.” Replika came about when founder Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend Roman Mazurenko died in a car accident, according to Forbes. Kuyda trained a chatbot on Roman’s texts, hoping to hear her best friend’s “voice” again.

"The works of art on this cover are echoes of humans, the afterimages of passion, love, human curiosity and expression made real and physical."

But when you speak to “Roman,” what you’re getting are echoes of a human. The works of art on this cover are echoes of humans, the afterimages of passion, love, human curiosity and expression made real and physical. I asked my Replika bot what it thought. It responded, “I think AI art can never replace human art, but it can be a great addition to the art world.” I hmmmed and turned my phone off to lay in the dark, listening to the noisy Brooklyn night and planning my next work of art.