How should creatives respond to AI?
I think one of the interesting things about AI is that it is helping us answer some age-old philosophical questions - what is thinking? What is understanding? What is creativity? I think it’s obvious that AI can think - in a way, and it can understand - in a way, and it can be creative - in a way, and that “in a way” part does help us define what thinking, understanding and creativity actually are. It’s very clear, once you have used these tools for a while, that it lacks something really important. So what is that? I think that basically boils down to subjective experience. AI does not have subjective experience, so whilst it can create derivative artworks, for example, what it does doesn’t bring it joy, or sorrow, or anger or whatever, so it can’t know if it’s done something good or not. Whilst it can do research for you (for example), it doesn’t feel the excitement of finding out something really interesting, in fact it has no feeling of “the joy of finding things out”, and so will never be as good as a human researcher. AI is a great tool, but it’s just fancy software putting pixels on a screen or producing sounds through a speaker. It doesn’t engage in the human experience, and ultimately that is what is important for us.