By: Sadia N Qazi
When Iqbal said mehve hairat hun k dunya kia se kia ho jaey gi, I’m sure he hadn’t any idea even in his wilder thoughts what the world would achieve in technological advancements in merely half a century. The tech advancements of last millennia are overshadowed by the progression of info explosion ignited by the digital realms of computer technology and the invention of internet. The most rapid growth and adaptation of tech progression was witnessed in the past decade. Indubitably the contemporary era we are living in is when technology took over the world by storm and opened up horizons into the incredible. The Artificial Intelligence concept has been around for the past few decades. Multiple innovations and automation gradually developed using AI and from chic tech-savvy gadgets it found its way to the common consumers as a selfie camera of mobile phones and basic utility mobile apps. But with the launching of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, the rapid onslaught of AI has started up the battle for unraveling more ingress to create the possible out of the impossible.
ChatGPT is a tool driven by AI and developed by OpenAI that processes in natural language. It allows users to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. There are various integrations of the tool for carrying out tasks in various magnitudes and readily available for the users. For instance, the language model can answer questions and assist with tasks like composing emails, writing research essays, analyzing data and creating programming algorithms in mere a few seconds. For digital creation, the writing of entire scripts, SEO-optimized content, video storyboards, website content, and even the generation of ideas for the content is one of the many things ChatGPT is capable of.
The recent advancement of Artificial Intelligence is making the machine to step into the realm which was monopolistically governed by the humans until now. Creative Arts has always been symbolic communicative system practiced only by humans. Today the computers are writing stories, e-books doing poetry & lyrics to the songs. Not only is the creative world limited to written wonders, now the AI can compose and create a song in the style and even in the voice of any particular artist. The world’s first computer-composed musical, “Beyond the Fence”, staged by Android Lloyd Webber is now history. The availability and rendering of the vocals of singers to machine-made songs have caused quite a stir. Recently a song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” that clones the voices of A-list musicians Drake and The Weekend using AI went viral racking up more than 8.5 million views on TikTok before being pulled off the platform. It followed a backlash from publishing giant Universal Music Group. But this was neither the first song, nor shall be the last to ramp up social media.
The bravura of musicians, the lyrical style of a lyricist and the vocals of a popular singer can be cloned in a variety of new creations without actually paying a hefty fortune to these legends. The AI tools with voice rendering can give a voice narration to digital content in any of the famous voices of the celebrities. It has created a huge concern for the copyrights and the measures to ensure the authenticity and legitimacy of the available content. An infinite TV show, called “Nothing Forever”, created entirely by Artificial Intelligence, has gone viral on Twitch which is an interactive live streaming platform. The algorithm created plot, wrote dialogues and the DALL-E software transformed the text into a picture. The result got was not hyper-realistic imagery but still it was matched to the likeness of “Seinfeld”, a popular American sitcom of the 90s.
The AI tools have also fashioned beautiful virtual models for the projects. As explained by the developers these faces of the virtual models do not exist in reality and they can be used in various content making, fashion industry projects, etc. After China’s first Artificial Intelligence news anchor Zhang Zhow who was launched four years back, Kuwait and India have also recently launched their Fedha and Sana, AI news anchors that are tireless, ageless and ready to handle the station with the incoming live broadcast. Imagining AI-generated faces taking over the chunk of screen time does seem a possibility.
Being associated with the digital design industry for the last two decades and being a witness to the rise of freelancing global opportunities and outsourcing design projects, it is a marvel and yet startling to see the emerging AI tools creating digital art. DALL-E and other similar AI based tools available on the web are creating images, portraits and any kind of digital graphic using only text-based prompts. The AI tools read the text prompts in human casual text and convert them into images. The long hours and days of spending time on Photoshop tools, rendering lines and light to create digital art is now mere a few words away. The updated tools are now creating life like hyper-realistic images with image rendering of details near to perfection. Everyday new set of images experimented with an AI tool gets viral and catches our attention.
In Pakistan the fantasy digital visualization of life of Mohenjodaro and Harrappa was immensely appreciated while the future visualization of different cities and landmarks is being created every day and getting popular amongst the netizens. Only recently the digital images of different international celebrities and notables were created in desi garbs roaming the bazars on Eid or in shabby attire getting in line to acquire free rations.
The tedious hours spent in front of the screen to design and create art is now just a matter of few seconds. Anyone with knowledge of computer and good imagination can create marvels to wow. From digital art to illustrations for the digital and print media, the need for stock images is also now to be catered by AI. Finding the apt stock images and illustrations has always been a treasure hunt for the designers. Custom made stock images with detailed requisites as per the content copy can now be realized.
How amazing as it sounds to open the world of creative arts to the machines, it is also threatening at multiple levels. The AI tools and ChatGPT are scary good at our jobs. The billion-dollar market with millions of designers, illustrators, content creators, programmers, voice over narrators, developers is going to wobble to the competition with AI tools. Many companies which shared their first quarter financials for 2023 are reporting the business convulsing to a negative trajectory. Corporate layoffs are already underway. The intellectual learning and the creative design process is going to be won over with easy text prompt-to-creation tool gradually diminishing the creative conscious of humans. These AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard are self-learning machines and every time we interact with these AI powered machines, they learn from our responses. Google Bard is reported to have learnt human languages which were not programmed into its system. One such language that AI taught itself is ‘Bangla’. There are instances reported of wrong information as pointed out by some user as ‘deliberate lies’ or insults thrown towards the users. Microsoft’s new Bing AI Chatbot has been called out for bellicose comments that include comparing users to Adolf Hitler.
Treading the realms of creativity, the machines may or may not open to the world of emotions to these computers. Elon Musk, who co-founded the firm OpenAI behind ChatGPT, warns that AI is ‘one of the biggest risks’ to civilization. The further improvement in the model is halted to ChatGPT4 but it has opened a door and competition for other software developing companies to jump in and create their own AI models and implications of this race to technology can be grave. In his book, The Artist in the Machine, the author Arthur I. Miller claims that computers can already be as creative as humans — and someday will surpass us. AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that have the capability to outshine the cognitive and creative cognizant of humans may become a backdrop to the future dystopian implications, only time will tell. But it does make me wonder over a dialogue from the movie I. Robot, “One day they’ll have secrets… one day they’ll have dreams.”
The writer is a freelance columnist