A few months ago, my brother messaged me about a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) he was experimenting with: Midjourney. Found on the social media platform, Discord, Midjourney allows the user to type in a phrase and AI will generate an image (a picture).
My brother, a technical and creative genius, known for his paintings and sculpture, was using it to create various beautiful images. He suggested I use it to create illustrations for my Alex and Theo book series. I tried it, creating the four images seen here. The challenge I found was that Midjourney had difficulty creating bodies. The heads and faces looked great, but sometimes an arm would be missing, sometimes a leg would be turned backwards giving my creation a weird twist, quite unsuited to my purposes.
After making 25 AI creations for free (after that a person has to pay), I gave up and decided to work with a human illustrator. I will note that my brother stuck with it and was able to create some amazing images, which interestingly other artists then began to imitate. Since the artists did not need my brother’s exceptional technical skill (which in ‘real life’ sets him apart), they were able to imitate what he did with the help of AI.
When asked about this by an interviewer (yes, my brother is actually interviewed - cool right!), my brother said that though AI can be technically skilled, it is the idea behind artwork which must stand apart.
Since this experience, it seems like AI has been appearing everywhere. My son, (yes, one of the twins inspiring my book series), who is now a middle-schooler, came home to tell me that ChatGPT could write an essay for students. I soon read about it again in the news because it appears that students in Stanford University have been using ChatGPT in their final exams. Over the 2022-2023 college winter break, a young programmer created an app/program called GPTZero which can detect if the user has utilized ChatGPT. Obviously, this app is in high demand.
It feels like this could turn into an endless battle: AI versus AI detection! Then, the people wanting to use AI for subversive purposes will have to find ways around the detection.
I have a similar situation. I’m a teacher, and all my students have laptops. We now have a program called Go Guardian which allows us to watch all the students’ screens when they are logged in. The reason for this is that some students would choose not to use the computer for schoolwork and would use it purely for entertainment purposes. We teachers shut down their TikTok videos and games, and the students try to find ways around the teacher’s detection.
So, for me, what is the ‘heart of the problem’?
Before I answer, I ask you: Why are the students at Stanford cheating? Don’t they enjoy what they are doing? Are they just doing it for the result (a diploma and money) and not for the process (learning)? Or is it that the learning is not valuable and so students want to avoid the learning tasks? I don’t know the answer to those questions.
Maybe some people would assume that humans will naturally want to avoid work – that this is human nature.
If this is human nature, to want to avoid work, how can we explain that the same people can at other times or situations have the exact opposite reaction. We see people working hard at things that are considered “work”.
We could look at this way: people don’t avoid doing what they like and enjoy. People have lots of motivation and energy and enthusiasm when they feel joy in their work.
Why then are there so many students and adults (if I can go so far as to say that) who would avoid their work if they could?
So, I will suggest an idea: maybe society’s activities have lost touch with the individual. Maybe the structures we have created no longer meet the needs of all individuals.
If this were the case, then life tasks (like college) might become perfunctory - activities that some students would rather just cheat their way through rather than actually do.
To take this further: if society has lost touch with the individual, and each individual is required to live in society, then maybe each of us, to some degree, has lost touch with ourselves as well.
Maybe the reason we have lost touch with our inner drive, our inner voice, is because society doesn’t provide enough space for it. We are born into a world that is already in progress, and then we join it. But, if this world doesn’t fit us, then what?
This might be the vicious circle we are caught in.
If you are a lucky one, one of those individuals who is loving your life in every way, then I applaud you.
But, if you are like those Stanford students who would rather just cheat to get out of doing what you’re doing, then what a dilemma. Because cheating our way through life would mean we never really lived our joy.
Is it possible to create a world in which we will not want AI to do our work for us?
Can we create a world in which we will want to do our own artwork, write our own stories, and do our own learning?
I suppose this is something each of us will have to decide, and from these collective decisions the world will continue to be created.
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