Will the End of Creativity Be the End of Humanity?
Strong statement? Scary? Maybe. Creativity comes from a deep part of us; the subconscious, the intuitive self, the heart, the soul, God, the Universe…whatever words you want to use to describe where these creative flashes of inspiration come from.
Creative expression has enlightened the world. The music of Mozart, the writing of Shakespeare, the art of Picasso. Warhol, The Beatles, Dickens…An enormous list of well-known and little-known creations. Creations that go beyond artistic expression. Laws, philosophy, history, engineering, inventions. Without creative expression, how do we evolve? How do we find joy? We can all create—paint, write poetry, write music, play an instrument—and I believe it’s a necessary component of what makes us human and assists us in our spiritual evolution.
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the evolution of technology like chat-GPT may sound like an astonishing and life-changing new tool. AI can generate pretty much anything we want or need.
How do you know what is real and what is created by AI?
Several months ago, I started experimenting with Chat-GPT for the first time after a friend insisted it was a great way to write text for nearly anything. Anything? I asked. What about poems and essays, fiction? Yes, he answered. The idea of a machine writing poetry and creating pieces that come from the heart and soul gave me pause.
Why would someone want to have something written for them, instead of using their own creativity to write something beautiful, thought-provoking, or even rebellious? What’s the point of writing then? It felt like cheating. Fake. And perhaps just another means of censorship, as AI creates based on what it is fed.
I write for the love of writing and the growth that comes through self-expression.
I started asking Chat-GPT simple questions; write a short romantic poem, write a short story about spiritual growth. The more I asked Chat-GPT, the more I realized writers may have nothing to fear. Although quickly generated, the writing was mediocre, unnatural, and unoriginal. However, it was written well enough to perhaps be sold somewhere in the world as an “original” creative work. Especially since it only took a few seconds to generate several paragraphs. I thought to myself, one could create a book within a couple of hours. And perhaps, many people would buy the mediocre creation and accept it as “art.”
This is the degradation of art. It becomes oversimplified, with no depth and emotion behind the language, just bland writing devoid of heart and soul.
After my second book was published this summer the eBook was available immediately on several sites as a “free” PDF. The users had to pay a monthly subscription to read my book. My book. Being sold without my permission, and without me receiving any royalties. It went beyond my book. Almost any book you could imagine was available, from big-name writers like Stephen King to relatively unknown me. Piracy has been happening for a long time, but AI makes it so much easier.
I wrote takedown notices to the hosts and contacted Cloudflare (many of these sites go through Cloudflare to hide their hosts) demanding takedowns. I sent emails to the infringers and contacted government organizations—all to no avail. Nothing happened. My books remained on the sites and the illegal sites continued to operate. I read that there was nothing to be done. Most of these illegal sites are hosted in foreign countries, many have ways of not being found out. I decided to stop wasting time and energy writing letters and continue working on my next book.
Recently, I learned something new—the existence of “deepfake porn.” Using AI, there are those who use the faces of real women, attach them to AI-generated naked bodies, and create porn. Several women have discovered their faces being used on AI-generated bodies on several sites. Can you imagine the violation? This is far worse than pirating books.
I Googled “deepfake porn” hoping to read more commentary about it. The top hits that popped up were deepfake porn sites. This obviously crosses many moral and legal lines. It’s basically human piracy. There are no laws or protections against it, although they have been discussing banning deepfake porn since at least 2021.
There are also scammers out there, trying to copy your voice using AI so they can get past voice recognition security and access your data. Plagiarize your words, thoughts, emotions. Create a mini you, to steal your money, or worse—your entire identity. These scammers are convincing and look entirely legitimate.
How much do you want AI in your life? Writing emotionless stories, creating bland art, copying your voice, your thoughts, your words, creating fake images that look real—creating a copy of your body or personality. In the future, perhaps stealing your soul. What happens when you die? You can live on in these artificial lifeforms. Not me.
How would you feel if you had a microchip inserted into your brain to connect with the digital world? It’s a real thing, not some science-fiction conspiracy theory. Elon Musk’s Neuralink recently received government approval for human trials.
Publishers have already started using AI to narrate books, doing away with the depth and emotion of the human voice. Amazon KDP, for example, is currently beta testing AI-narrated audiobooks. YouTube is beta testing using celebrity voices generated by AI for videos.
For now, tech creators believe they are the masters. But how long before the roles are reversed and AI becomes “conscious” evolving into the master role? This is not “The Terminator” or “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This is not a fantastical future that science fiction writers penned about many years ago. This is real and this is happening now. Many of these scientific experiments are attempting to “awaken” AI, and give it a consciousness, a soul. Some of the reasoning is that if you give AI a soul, it is less likely to go rogue. How exactly do they know that?
Do you want to read AI-generated writing? See AI-generated art? Or would you rather read and see those things created by an actual human, infused with real emotion that comes from a pure heart and soul?
AI impacts all writers, authors of fiction and non-fiction, journalists, lawyers, scriptwriters, and editors. Anything that is currently being written by humans can be written by AI.
AI can produce visual art. Paintings, 3-D sculptures, graphic designs, architecture and engineering plans, photographs.
AI can write symphonies and songs, narrate audiobooks, and create music that is “pleasing” to ears.
How many will be unemployed? How many artists will lose the ability to make a living creating? How much of our humanity will be lost in the process? Creativity is a necessity for positive human evolution. Creativity is also a necessity for freedom. AI creates for the “average” masses. What about the unconventional creator? Those that break the mold and have a significant impact on society? Those whose viewpoints are different from society, maybe even controversial? AI is censorship.
What about the future? Do you want to be tracked everywhere you go both in the physical and the virtual? Your information is already out there in government or corporation digital files—health records, tax data, and social media, for example. There is no such thing as privacy anymore. I know most of us know this. What we sometimes may not understand, are the long-term consequences.
You will have a choice; you DO have a choice. The future of technology and the rampant rape of the human soul will happen if you let it. I ask that you look within—think about how you want to create. Do you want to take the easy way out? The artificial way? Eventually, the dark way? Perhaps the Apocalypse isn’t about war but the destruction of the human soul. We all become little robotic citizens, everything we create is mediocre, and we consume things that harm us physically and emotionally because that’s what our brain chips tell us to do. And we believe it. We believe it all because, after all, those in power are looking out for us right?
The big question is: will you follow like a sheep or rebel against it?