Will AI rewrite the future?

Artificial intelligence is here, and it's not going away. With tech companies ingesting copyrighted material and interest in AI growing, how will creative people compete with an unpaid, 24/7, polymathic rival?

In my day job as a journalist, one covering the advertising and marketing industry, the current hot-topic is artificial intelligence. Last year Coca-Cola used AI to create its annual Christmas campaign. You know, the one with all the trucks, a jolly Father Christmas and the breathless "holidays are coming, holidays are coming" mantra that overlays it.

Above: Coca-Cola's 2024 AI-generated Christmas commercial.

Yep, all AI. Not that you could tell, because it looked pretty much like all the other hyper-real, non-AI versions of that ad from years past, and I think Coca-Cola was pushing the AI angle not because it was a brilliant and creative step into the future, but for more coverage in an AI-obsessed media [side note: it worked]. Toys 'R' Us, too, released an AI commercial in 2024, one that was roundly derided as being too shiny, too full of mistakes and, to my mind, a nightmarish, over-saturated hellscape.

Away from these two examples, relatively few commercial campaigns are entirely AI-created (for the moment, at least), but the advertising industry and the people working within it - the creatives who come up with the ideas and scripts, and the directors and production companies that produce them - are looking over their shoulder at a technology that's gaining momentum, increasing in quality and looking to assert its dominance.

The creatives who come up with the ideas are looking over their shoulder at a technology that's gaining momentum, increasing in quality and looking to assert its dominance.

"It'll never compete with human filmmaking," someone I know said only a few months ago. "It can't even talk." That was true... until recently. If you'd seen any AI video imagery before a few weeks back, none of the generated characters within it could speak. The technology hadn't yet evolved to be able to synch lips with dialogue, so all the videos were montages, with no speech other than voice over. Not any more.

A friend of mine who works in the industry and who is a very clever, tech-savvy, AI-interested guy used Google's new Deepmind Veo 3 to create a video that perfectly (in most cases) allowed the characters he created to talk. He tweeted [yes 'tweeted'. You can't 'X' something] the results and that tweet went viral.

I even spoke to Ari for an interview and, with minimal prompts to Veo 3, and in less than five minutes, it spat out a video of the two of us [well, its interpretation of the two of us from the prompts it received] conducting a Zoom interview. Veo is restricted to eight seconds of speech at the moment, but what it created [below] in such a short amount of time was mind-blowing. So, if we didn't already know, AI is no longer the future, it's very much the present.

Above: Google's Veo 3 spat out this video of 'me' talking to 'Ari Kuschnir' within a few minutes.

But what does this mean for authors, filmmakers, musicians and artists of all different types? How worried should we be that encroaching artificial fingers might be squeezing human creators out of a living? Some say not at all, that AI is like any other tool, something we can use to our advantage but which inevitably remains under our creative control.

“I’m encouraged by AI,” said historical fiction author GL Simon in an article on Forbes, “but it is just a tool, same as the typewriter, computer, internet, and any number of devices and databases available now or in the future. I have used AI to give me ideas for dialectical dialogue and cover art. I then take what is given and rewrite it or adjust it to my artistic taste.” That article was published in August of last year, though, eons ago as far as AI technology is concerned.

Others are less sanguine about the impact of this new technology, and one of the main fears has been how the large language models [LLM] of AI companies have been using existing, copyrighted content - books, movies, art etc - to train their systems. As far back as 2023, the Author's Guild released an open letter and petition asking the leaders of AI companies "to obtain consent, credit, and fairly compensate writers for the use of copyrighted materials in training AI."

Zuckerberg told us that "AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life." But whose quality of life, and at what expense?

These AI companies seem to say the right things, talking about working in tandem with writers and artists, and respecting the time, effort and creativity that went into producing these artefacts in the first instance. But then they also say that LLMs need more content to make them better. More input to help them learn. More ideas to make them effective. They tell us not to worry and that AI is here to help; but help who? Last year, founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, told us that "AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life." But whose quality of life, and at what expense?

At the moment it seems to come down to trust; do we trust these companies to be truthful in what they're doing, and to remunerate the creators of the work they feed their machines? I'm not going to answer for you but, personally, I've got more faith in Liz Truss being appointed governor of the Bank of England. The fact that Meta used the LibGen database (a huge, illegal library of pirated books) to help train its Llama 3 LLM, and that billionaire Zuckerberg apparently signed off on this should not fill anyone with hope that the copyrighted work of authors and other artists will be respected.

A recent interview with Salman Rushdie in The Observer also touched on AI, with Rushdie believing that authors don't have anything to fear from artificial intelligence... yet. “For one thing," Rushdie stated, "[AI] has no sense of humour. The machine can absorb a million jokes, but it can't make one up, because you only get a version of the million old jokes. Unfortunately, however, this thing learns very fast. If there's a moment when there’s a funny book written by AI – then I think we’re screwed.”

Above: Chris Baker's column tells us "don't bow down to the hype, because the human fingerprint will always win out".

And in a column written for advertising industry publication shots by Chris Baker, who featured in the inaugural Bookmarked interview last month, his point of view chimes with Rushdie's. Chris too, believes that artificial intelligence won't replace human creativity because it can't replicate the humanity of art, and that "deep down, we know when something was born in sweat and struggle versus something spat out by a digital fever dream."

While AI can learn, it can't experience. It can't feel. It can't taste, or smell.

The debate around AI and its impact on industry, artistry and humanity will continue for a long time to come, but as to whether it can truly compete with human authors and artists of all stripes, that seems unlikely, at least for now. While AI can learn, it can't experience. It can't feel. It can't taste, or smell. It can't be happy, or heartbroken, or scared.

It can learn what those things mean, sure. It can regurgitate any number of words related to all of those senses and emotions, but that's all it is, regurgitation. Art is impactful because of its ability to surprise, for one person's experience to be distilled in such a way that it is fresh, unusual, shocking... emotive in a way that takes that person's experiences and thoughts and repackages them into an affecting story, painting, song, sculpture or any number of artistic endeavours.

So, while technology will always evolve, and while fear of that evolution will always surface, I believe that the human element of art will always overcome.