I don’t trust AI, but I use it all the time.
Let’s face it, that’s a sentiment that many of us can buy into if we’re honest about it. It comes from Paul Mallaghan, Head of Creative Strategy at We Are Tilt, a creative transformation content and campaign agency whose clients include the likes of Diageo, KPMG and Barclays.
Taking part in a panel debate on AI ethics at the recent Evolve conference in Brighton, UK, he made another highly pertinent point when he said of people in general:
We know that we are quite susceptible to confident bullshitters. Basically, that is what Chat GPT [is] right now. There’s something reminds me of the illusory truth effect, where if you hear something a few times, or you say it here it said confidently, then you are much more likely to believe it, regardless of the source. I might refer to a certain President who uses that technique fairly regularly, but I think we’re so susceptible to that that we are quite vulnerable.
And, yes, it’s you he’s talking about:
I mean all of us, no matter how intelligent we think we are or how smart over the machines we think we are. When I think about trust, – and I’m coming at this very much from the perspective of someone who runs a creative agency – we’re not involved in building a Large Language Model (LLM); we’re involved in using it, understanding it, and thinking about what the implications if we get this wrong. What does it mean to be creative in the world of LLMs?
Genuine
Being genuine, is vital, he argues, and being human – where does Human Intelligence come into the picture, particularly in relation to creativity. His argument:
There’s a certain parasitic quality to what’s being created. We make films, we’re designers, we’re creators, we’re all those sort of things in the company that I run. We have had to just face the fact that we’re using tools that have hoovered up the work of others and then regenerate it and spit it out. There is an ethical dilemma that we face every day when we use those tools.
His firm has come to the conclusion that it has to be responsible for imposing its own guidelines here to some degree, because there’s not a lot happening elsewhere:
To some extent, we are always ahead of regulation, because the nature of being creative is that you’re always going to be experimenting and trying things, and you want to see what the next big thing is. It’s actually very exciting. So that’s all cool, but we’ve realized that if we want to try and do this ethically, we have to establish some of our own ground rules, even if they’re really basic. Like, let’s try and not prompt with the name of an illustrator that we know, because that’s stealing their intellectual property, or the labor of their creative brains.
I’m not a regulatory expert by any means, but I can say that a lot of the clients we work with, to be fair to them, are also trying to get ahead of where I think we are probably at government level, and they’re creating their own frameworks, their own trust frameworks, to try and address some of these things. Everyone is starting to ask questions, and you don’t want to be the person that’s accidentally created a system where everything is then suable because of what you’ve made or what you’ve generated.
Originality
That’s not necessarily an easy ask, of course. What, for example, do we mean by originality? Mallaghan suggests:
Anyone who’s ever tried to create anything knows you’re trying to break patterns. You’re trying to find or re-mix or mash up something that hasn’t happened before. To some extent, that is a good thing that really we’re talking about pattern matching tools. So generally speaking, it’s used in every part of the creative process now. Most agencies, certainly the big ones, certainly anyone that’s working on a lot of marketing stuff, they’re using it to try and drive efficiencies and get incredible margins. They’re going to be on the race to the bottom.
But originality is hard to quantify. I think that actually it doesn’t happen as much as people think anyway, that originality. When you look at ChatGPT or any of these tools, there’s a lot of interesting new tools that are out there that purport to help you in the quest to come up with ideas, and they can be useful. Quite often, we’ll use them to sift out the crappy ideas, because if ChatGPT or an AI tool can come up with it, it’s probably something that’s happened before, something you probably don’t want to use.
More Human Intelligence is needed, it seems:
What I think any creative needs to understand now is you’re going to have to be extremely interesting, and you’re going to have to push even more humanity into what you do, or you’re going to be easily replaced by these tools that probably shouldn’t be doing all the fun stuff that we want to do. [In terms of ethical questions] there’s a bunch, including the copyright thing, but there’s partly just [questions] around purpose and fun. Like, why do we even do this stuff? Why do we do it? There’s a whole industry that exists for people with wonderful brains, and there’s lots of different types of industries [where you] see different types of brains. But why are we trying to do away with something that allows people to get up in the morning and have a reason to live? That is a big question.
My second ethical thing is, what do we do with the next generation who don’t learn craft and quality, and they don’t go through the same hurdles? They may find ways to use {AI] in ways that we can’t imagine, because that’s what young people do, and I have faith in that. But I also think, how are you going to learn the language that helps you interface with, say, a video model, and know what a camera does, and how to ask for the right things, how to tell a story, and what’s right? All that is an ethical issue, like we might be taking that away from an entire generation.
And there’s one last ‘tough love’ question to be posed:
What if we’re not special? Basically, what if all the patterns that are part of us aren’t that special? The only reason I bring that up is that I think that in every career, you associate your identity with what you do. Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe that’s a bad thing, but I know that creatives really associate with what they do. Their identity is tied up in what it is that they actually do, whether they’re an illustrator or whatever. It is a proper existential crisis to look at it and go, ‘Oh, the thing that I thought was special can be regurgitated pretty easily’…It’s a terrifying thing to stare into the Gorgon and look back at it and think,’Where are we going with this?’. By the way, I do think we’re special, but maybe we’re not as special as we think we are. A lot of these patterns can be matched.
My take
This was a candid worldview that raised a number of tough questions – and questions are often so much more interesting than answers, aren’t they? The subject of creativity and copyright has been handled at length on diginomica by Chris Middleton and I think Mallaghan’s comments pretty much chime with most of that.
I was particularly taken by the point about the impact on the younger generation of having at their fingertips AI tools that can ‘do everything, until they can’t’. I recall being horrified a good few years ago when doing a shift in a newsroom of a major tech title and noticing that the flow of copy had suddenly dried up. ‘Where are the stories?’, I shouted. Back came the reply, ‘Oh, the Internet’s gone down’. ‘Then pick up the phone and call people, find some stories,’ I snapped. A sad, baffled young face looked back at me and asked, ‘Who should we call?’. Now apart from suddenly feeling about 103, I was shaken by the fact that as soon as the umbilical cord of the Internet was cut, everyone was rendered helpless.
Take that idea and multiply it a billion-fold when it comes to AI dependency and the future looks scary. Human Intelligence matters
