‘A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.’ Alan Touring

It’s funny to think how most computers were initially designed to make human lives better by replacing them in painstaking tasks such as assembly lines, vacuuming pools or multiplying head-scratching sums. Most of these technological advances have in fact helped make human lives much, much easier. 

However, the recent universal access to AI has brought an interesting turn of events to the table. ChatGPT can create a relatively neat piece of writing in a matter of seconds, regardless of how devoid of human sentiment and how many superfluous terms it comes up with to sound painstakingly eloquent, thus making a professional writer’s lifetime of craft-mastering dangerously obsolete. If you thought it was hard enough already to make it as a writer in a world where literature gave way to endless, meaningless scrolling, think again. 

The same can be said with visual arts. Image-generating AI can produce a stunning piece of imagery in the exact style of a particular illustrator upon request for a fraction of the price and in less than ten seconds. It does so by ‘predicting the next pixel’, a concept that I still struggle to get my head around. How far we have come.

All of these advances have not only made me feel old in my late twenties, but they have also got me thinking – regardless of how much slower than a supercomputer. While the world of creatives is at risk like never before, most blue-collar jobs are relatively safe from this super cyber competitor. The majority of essential physical jobs like fruit picking, painting or construction are hard to replace – at least for now. 

From my romantic point of view that AI is yet to be able to replicate, I go back to my initial argument of the role of technology in making our lives easier. We have come full circle in this fascinating, make-that-chip-more-micro evolution, left to do the heavy lifting and manual labour that robots were supposed to replace us in whilst AI runs the show.

Much like Prometheus’ perpetual punishment for bringing fire down from the mountain, the modern artist is left behind to admire the landscape, reminiscing of times past with calluses growing in their hands while a machine urges them to pick up their pace to meet the daily quota. It does make you wonder, doesn’t it?