On AI: "So What?"

"Oh, it's AI," swipe. 

If you're anything like me, this is a daily occurrence lately. A glimpse of what, at thumbnail size, looks like a painting or an interesting photograph or an animated graphic on social media, immediately closed and hurriedly brushed off the screen when it becomes clear that it was created by generative artificial intelligence. Not just images and videos, either, sometimes it's the 'personal' introductions on the websites of businesses, the blurbs that accompany product listings on Internet retailers, recipes with anecdotal introductions of a length that would make Proust blush with envy. Always the promise of something interesting to learn, some creative and stimulating project to share in or some new craft to try out, and always the slight sense of betrayal when the mechanical impostor's mask slips. 'They tricked me', we grumble, and chuck our phones dejectedly onto the sofa cushions. 

What's more, it has become clear that these programmes and their users will find it easier and easier to trick us. We've gone from Will Smith spooning infinite waterfalls of spaghetti into his distended, demonic mouth to totally persuasive simulated environments and close-up facial performances in the space of a few months. Everyone who ever slighted a phony AI image for having shiny plastinated skin or nine fingers on one hand will have convincingly-globby egg on their face within a year, if not sooner, because these programmes have demonstrated beyond a doubt the speed at which they can learn, and their creators have told us just as clearly that no copyright law nor environmental concern will stop them in their relentless quest to make a computer that can do exactly what someone else did before only more dull. 

So, we can realistically anticipate a near future where publicly-available computer programmes can create moving images that depict whatever the user wants to a level of refinement that is indistinguishable from a Hollywood film. It won't be a question of whether artificial intelligence can do an accurate impression of a human writer or musician or actor, it will merely be a question of how long it takes to do so. Anyone who ever dismissed generative AI on the basis of the uncanny valley will be made to eat their words. 
Which leads me to the question that I, personally, always wish people asked more often:

So what?

Who cares that the impression a computer can do of a real creative human being is so uncanny that it's hard to tell the difference? So what? Does the fact that a person might be fooled into mistaking artificial video or audio or text for the real thing mean that they have to shrug and accept it as real? If someone makes a cake that looks so much like a Bakelite rotary phone that you attempt to pick up the receiver and end up with a fist full of crushed Victoria sponge, does that mean that you have to renounce all functioning phones and spend the rest of your life smashing baked goods into the side of your head screaming 'hello, hello, operator'?
The technological feats performed by AI are impressive. They're not creative, they're arguably not even creation, but they're undeniably technically impressive. And just as talented character designers, storyboard artists and animators can create computer-generated images that are put together to become a beautiful, moving film, so too in theory could an AI be programmed to recycle its constituent reference materials to create a work of art that speaks to the human condition and uses the structural, rhythmic and thematic devices of human storytelling to stir emotion in the viewer. If the viewer is not familiar with the source inputs that the AI used to create the piece, they might even see this as a startlingly original, creative piece of work. The con could be pulled off. A person could be involved, stirred and moved to tears by a film devised and rendered entirely by a computer. 

But so what? 
I don't want to look at paintings that nobody painted. I don't want to watch films containing performances that actors didn't perform, or cartoons that animators didn't animate. I don't want to listen to music that had no feeling, living, expressive human being involved anywhere in the process of conjuring it up. There will be times when I'm fooled, I'm certain, times when I watch a piece of video or listen to a whole song, or a whole album of songs, without having the merest suspicion that they were generated artificially. 
But so what?
Once I realise that I've been tricked, I'll turn the thing off. I won't recommend that anyone else seek it out. I certainly won't praise it in any public forum. Even leaving aside the ecologically devastating energy costs and the grand larceny at the heart of the whole field, stealing the likenesses, voices, writing and artwork of millions with no serious attempt ever made to compensate or even acknowledge the owners, not to mention the jobs it will at some point steal from designers, artists, writers, actors, cinematographers and everyone else who ever had anything they really wanted to say, I'm just not interested in artificially generated art. I avoid it, purposefully. I don't want to waste a second looking at it if I can help it. 

Because a human didn't make it.

I love the arts because they are a product of humanity. They speak to people about being a person. Even the most generic, boilerplate, explosion-filled action movie contains ideas, feelings and decisions that human people thought of, communicated and worked hard to capture, so that it could be shared with other human people. And guess what: some of those ideas are pinched from other films, too, because human artists steal just like generative AI does. We're all products of our influences. The difference between us and the machines is that we can't help but stain those stolen thoughts with our own experiences, our own personalities, our own mistakes, before we repeat them. We leave our fingerprints all over everything, and the fingerprints are what make it special. 
Even when Aardman uses computer animation instead of clay, they know they have to add in the fingerprints. 

There will, undoubtedly, be people who don't care one way or another where their recreational art comes from. As long as it's convenient and to their tastes, they'll be over the moon to watch the latest simulated Ghostbusters reboot, especially if they can digitally adjust it to feature as many or as few women as they'd like. If you don't care about anything but the end result feeling more-or-less like what you imagined, then good news: you never have to think about this ever again.
But if you're someone who cares about artists, or even pretends to, even if just to look sexy at parties, then it's time to realise that this is not a question of quality control, it's a question of ideology. It's a simple question: do you want there to be art made by humans in the world? If you answered 'yes', you must accept that human artists need to be able to make a living from their work, and as such they must have a certain degree of ownership over their creations, and the sanctity of that real, authentic, authored work must be recognised. Therefore, you must oppose any challenger to these values. 

You must reject generative AI on ideological grounds, no matter how impressive its imitation of life may become. 

At least baking a cake telephone takes skill.

- Tom Crowley, May 2025