Looming like a dark cloud over this year's San Diego Comic Con was the mysterious and sinister threat of AI. Everywhere, I could sense the dread over how this behemoth is going to dismantle the industry as we know it, starting with the most vulnerable artists. This year I attended a couple mixers for creatives from various industries held in the nearby Marriott and I was surprised by the diversity of people I met, from fresh college graduates to Emmy winners. The impression I had was of everyone sensing a new instability in the already fragile ecosystem of the entertainment arts. So the last panel I attended for this year's Con was one called "A.I. and the Creative Industries: Where We Stand", which was held in a small room, Room 32AB. The room rapidly filled up, every seat was taken and people were standing in the aisles, a fact that seemed to surprise the moderator. When he asked for a show of hands how many of us were artists or professionals of some other variety in entertainment or arts, many hands shot up, and I sensed an extraordinary fervency in attention to what the panel had to say.
The panel (going from left to right in the above photo) was Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago professor who specialises in AI technology, Tim Friedlander, a voice actor who is also the president of the National Association of Voice Actors, and Deana Igelsrud, a Democrat who was representing the Concept Art Association. At one point, she came to tears as she talked about the situation, which she described as corporations wanting to "kill art." A QR code for a petition was presented on a power point--I signed it and if you would like to as well, you can find it here.
Primarily, the panel was discussing how AI has been using art to generate its own material without credit or remuneration being given to the sources. Professor Zhao has developed a tool called Glaze which alters visual art on a level imperceptible to the human eye but which sabotages imitative AI so that, if you put a Van Gogh painting through the AI that's been treated with Glaze, it comes out looking like digital puke. Meanwhile, Friedlander discussed how there essentially exists no protection for voice actors whose voices can now be easily replicated by AI. In some cases, actors have willingly signed away the rights to their voices, the most famous being the recently deceased James Earl Jones, who signed his voice over to Disney to use for depictions of Darth Vader in perpetuity.
While the performance given by the AI generative voice on the Obi-wan Kenobi series was notably weaker than Jones' in the films, it was still indistinguishable from a real human voice, so you can see the concern voice actors would have for the impact of the technology on their livelihoods, especially when young, struggling voice actors might be convinced to sign their voices away forever.
Igelsrud spoke about how prominent figures, like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, have been speaking in favour of AI. I share the dread everyone feels about what AI is going to do, and what it's already doing, but I don't think Scorsese and Lucas are endorsing AI because they've been bribed. I think they recognise the inevitability. I think most artists, particularly those in the less publicly visible sections of production, are something like carriage drivers at the dawn of the automobile. I don't see how AI could ever replace human creativity, but I'd have never imagined AI could do what it's already doing. As big a threat as it is to the livelihoods of so many people, perhaps the bigger threat is to the basic value of the human mind itself.
There are two big problems with any attempt to stave off the encroachment of AI. Igelsrud mentioned one when she said that any time their efforts reached high level politicians, they were told that attempts to regulate AI in the US would set the country back in its competition with other countries, particularly China. The other problem is that people enjoy AI produced content, such as the above video of Darth Vader in Fortnite. It is funny. It works. As much as people might admire the glamour of a successful artist's life, most people have no true conception of what it is to be an artist, and simply can't imagine the harm AI presents. At the end of the day, human artists, at least of the calibre produced by a competitive system which has no rival to surpass humans, will become extinct.
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