What value does art have and what role can, can and should AI play in this? I raised this question in my keynote speech at the CLTR 2024 conference organised by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property.
I started my input with a self-revelation: my fingernails are fake. The real ones fell victim to the creative pressure under which this speech was written. They were bitten off.
With that it became clear that human creativity follows a completely different logic than the work of AI-controlled text, image and music generators:
A language model is not an author, it has no idea of and no feeling for language. It does not talk. It calculates. It has no needs. It has no intention. Just as the sausage machine spits out the sausage, ChatGPT spits out the text.
Human creativity only has a future if we recognise the fundamental difference between AI-generated output and human-created art.
If we don’t, the artistic pipeline created by humans will dry up. And at the same time it drowns. And it is drowning in the flood of output generated by AI.
The whole thing is made possible by tech companies’ nonchalant approach to copyright. Regardless of how you feel about this in detail, AI always raises the question of justice in the context of culture, art and creativity.
And no, AI does not ‘democratise’ creativity, it ‘oligarchises’ it. AI companies are squeezing out the creative work of artists. Like a lemon. The profits do not flow into studios, but into Silicon Valley.
Anyone who claims that generative AI is democratising art needs to show how existing gatekeepers can be overcome and how the creative industry can be revitalised and made fairer at the same time.
Until then, such phrases are just hot air. And we already have enough of that in the context of AI, not just figuratively but also literally, if you look at the energy intensity of data centres.
In the interview, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property asked me, among other things, how I came to the topic of AI and ethics.
An algorithm was to blame. Namely the one from Twitter (now X). The first tweet that was flushed into my timeline when I opened an account there was about AI. And the topic has stayed with me ever since.
After more than two decades of experience in business ethics, I am particularly ‘triggered’ by the following: When it comes to questions of business ethics, it’s always: the market decides. We have no room for manoeuvre. AI is a continuation of this powerlessness with technological means. The market is replaced by the algorithm, which seemingly disempowers us.
My aim is to emphasise the role and responsibility of humans.
On regulation: In October 2024, Switzerland will still be doing what it prefers to do. It is ‘observing’ and will probably hold back on regulation. That’s okay, but we still need a vision of the values that are important to us in society and the economy, and the extent to which AI can be designed to promote these values
Interested in a keynote on AI and creativity? Contact me »