Unpopular Opinions: WORD Christchurch Festival 2024

The idea of technology and AI being able to replace humans in various endeavours has long intrigued thinkers and dreamers and there is a reason speculative sci-fi is such a popular genre both in books and films e.g.: Neuromancer by William Gibson, the book and movie of Isaac Asimov's I robot, The Matrix, Bladerunner... We are fascinated by what machines are able to do. But surely the one thing AI is not capable of is the one thing unique to humans: the conception and creation of art.

This was my first WORD event as a blogger, and I was walking into an event where I really had no idea what to expect. Intrigued by a blurb which included the words; debate and riotous, I knew it was going to be surprising and possibly thrilling and Unpopular opinions did not disappoint in any way. This was not your typical author talk or discussion panel oh no...

A stage was set up for the six brave creatives ready to go into battle for their opinions.... with only four minutes and a hyper-attentive audience ready to clap them off if they went over time, and then judge them to have succeeded or failed to convince us with a paddle we could hold up.

The goal of each participant was to deliver their opinion on the rapid growth of technology on creativity and writing. Here is a run-down of what each of these wildly intelligent creative people said and how the audience reacted.

Nic Low

Nic came in strong with his opinion that AI is the best thing to happen to writers. Regaling us with the story of Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 essay “The Total Library”, which explores the concept of an all-encompassing archive or universal library. The idea of a library with every possible combination of writing. Nic said A.I is making this possible, and for writers, this means that A.I can do a lot of the hard yards towards producing a manuscript. Not a GOOD manuscript necessarily, but over time, something good will emerge.

The audience liked this idea, but didn’t give a unanimous ‘YES’ to Nic’s compelling argument.

Kia

Kia was up next with her argument that technology and AI is creating futures that are beige. She described the ‘homogenization of conversation’. Every time some new technology is released or taken up by crowds of people, everything starts to get very same same very quickly, and there is less organic content. She maintains that individuality of experience is what makes art and creativity, and this is where AI and smart technology falls very short. Needless to say, this got great support from the crowd, who mostly agreed that Beige is not the colour we want our art!

Joanna Preston

Joanna is a poet, lover of all things creative, and claimed that ink= innovation. She took us back to pre-historic times, before writing, where poetry and art was on walls, or in patterns or spoken. Ink and writing allowed people to make a permanent record. It also allowed people to hear other people's stories, increasing people's empathy, sympathy and understanding, leading to social movements. She cited Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oliver Twist as great examples of writing that had activated social change. Fast forward to 2016 and an AI computer program AlphaGo beat the world GO champion, changing the shape of the game forever. Joanna had a great go at convincing the audience that AI is just another extension of the creative written word, to be used and drawn from. It is ‘Modern Ink’! The crowd was definitely torn on this one...

Hannah Davison

Hannah maintains that Technology gives words more weight. She came to podcasting via needing to connect with art and people and ideas, but not being in a space where reading was possible or easy. She reminded us that this can be the case for a lot of people a lot of the time, and that listening to podcasts or spoken word can be much more engaging for people. It is more likely that you will laugh out loud when listening as opposed to reading, which releases more serotonin and dopamine, you can multi-task and you are more likely to feel comforted by hearing words rather than reading them. While the audience very much agreed with aspects of Hannah's talk, again, we were divided on whether we agreed completely! Tough crowd!

Lizzie Davidson

Lizzie strongly feels that technology is NOT useful for creating useful marketing. To stand out in a world where many companies offer similar products, you need life experience, emotional connections with your customers, and something that is singular about your company. AI does not create unique marketing material. It creates a generalization of current marketing. It is bland and not unique at all. Lizzie also pointed out that customers are suspicious of companies using AI... do you have something to hide? Do you not really care about individuality? Or the individual needs of each and every ‘valued’ customer? The audience mostly agreed with Lizzie on this. We were warming up with the heat of these strongly held opinions!

Ekant Veer

Gen AI is drowning out unique creative voices. Actually Mr Veer had me convinced when he stepped up to speak wearing a Laser kiwi t-shirt. But the great point he made was that Chat GPT data is still weighted towards white, European, middle class, western males. There is also a danger in AI making us lazy, where ‘good enough’ will do, and anything more will take too long and therefore not be produced. He maintained that while AI is useful for simple routine tasks, it is absolutely not useful for complex creative tasks.

Overall, I think this was the closest the audience came to a unanimous vote. It's safe to say that the audience, being a crowd full of literature-loving types, was always going to come down on the side of the humans, but wow did this panel challenge us to also see the uses and potential in modern technology!

After each speaker had their turn, there was a bit of time for questions and answers, and some interesting topics were touched upon, for example what happens when AI accesses the dark web? AI eats power and steals IP, and that for any good journalism, it is necessary to speak to the people who had the experience, visit the place, smell the smells. There is a hierarchy of sources, and the open web is very very far down the list.

This is a topic that will always be up for debate. Technology is definitely not going to slow down and it isn’t going away any time soon, so it's up to us to harness it, use it to enhance our creative processes and embrace the ways it makes some things easier. Our creativity skills are not under any threat, as long as we shift and change the way we always have.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” HG Wells

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