Artificial intelligence — or AI — has gotten a lot of press coverage lately. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Midjourney, or book-length AI-generated content being sold on Amazon, it seems everyone is talking these days about AI and its future, and its implications on our (humans) future. I’ve seen a lot of publishers address AI use in their spaces and some do everything to avoid addressing it.
Personally, I’m not one of those people who thinks AI as a concept is terrible or that AI-generated content will someday be more prevalent than content generated by a human mind. We’ve already seen enough pushback against the use of generative AI to know the latter is unlikely to ever happen. I do think, however, that we have reached an interesting crossroads in human existence, where we have to ask ourselves, “What is the value of human creativity?”
While artificial intelligences have created some interesting art pieces and interesting pieces of fiction — not all of which was intended to be fiction, but nonetheless was — but there’s an inherent lack of emotionality to what is created. And that’s understandable. Machines, at least at this point in their evolution, don’t have emotional memories. That is the one thing that sets living, breathing beings apart from circuit-based intelligences. It’s what makes our creative endeavors come to life on the screen and on the page. It’s also what allows for improvisation in art, music, and writing.
We can feel where a different note or word or color will make a piece inherently ours. That’s the value of human creativity. Our individual happiness, sadness, anger sets us apart as individuals.
So, to me, while AI can produce some interesting results, and there are clear uses for AI technologies to assist humans in the creative process, I won’t ever seek it out as a replacement for a human. Which is why won’t use AI-generative technologies to produce audiobooks or cover art. We also ask for our authors to not use AI-generated content in the final manuscripts they submit to us. A few AI-supplied words here and there is fine. But the concept, the writing, the improvisation should be something they can truthfully say is theirs.
Artificial intelligence isn’t going to go away. But neither are humans.
Epic Publishing 