BHUBANESWAR: Artificial intelligence (AI) may be cheaper and faster but it is not creative and original in any way. It does not originate and produce, it can only regenerate and reproduce, opined artist and graphic novelist George Mathen, popularly known as Appupen.
In a session on ‘Drawing the Future: Art and AI’ moderated by consulting editor of The Sunday Standard Ravi Shankar, he said technology, while powerful, threatens to undermine creativity and human imagination.
“AI is a big and powerful tool in the hands of tech billionaires. No public enterprise or even the government can afford such machines. It is all on the training data. Everybody is made to play with it and everybody is feeding on the stuff. That is how AI can learn to interact with humans better,” the writer-artist observed.
Voicing strong concerns over the growing dominance of AI, he said, it would destroy the creative scene and the creative people. “Children are already becoming overly dependent on tools like ChatGPT, losing their ability to think critically and imagine. It is purely a commercial thing,” he remarked.
Appupen argued that technology has reached a plateau in the labs and now relies heavily on human interaction for further training. “Everybody is being made to play with it so that it can later be completely paid or licence-based, and then you will be left with no brains to do anything, except just relying on it,” he cautioned.
The author of ‘Moonward’ sought for patience and critical evaluation of AI’s impact. “Why is there an urgency for mass adoption? We do not know what it is capable of and what it can throw up. Then why shove it down everybody’s throat? It is purely in corporate hands, and no government has any control over it. I see it as corporate flexing,” he said.
Citing the recent trends on Ghibli AI, which replicates the iconic animation style of Japan’s Studio Ghibli, the creator of the Halahala series of comics described it as a bigger blow to artists than government censorship. “This is corporate censoring. If even Studio Ghibli could not stop it, how can we?” he wondered.
Appupen urged governments and regulators to step in with safeguards. “In the US, you cannot publish a book and make money with AI-generated art, because it is understood that such art is stolen from online without artists’ permission to train the AI. We do not have such kinds of regulations here,” said the co-author of ‘Dream Machine: AI and the Real World’.