On GenAI 🤖

Good news! Everyone can be a creator now! All thanks to a little, magical tool called "Generative AI". With just a single sentence—or you know, not even that—you can create music, blog posts, illustrations, photography, videos, you name it!

Unsurprisingly, also before the age of Generative AI, you were able to become a creator. Only before, it took effort. Nobody likes to work hard though! Today, you can be a respected creator and all that is asked of you is to feed a tool with a sentence. Typos and misspellings are forgiven of course, so you don't even have to try that hard (at this point, please forgive my cynicism).

Generative AI fits right into the fast-paced times that we are living in right now. It's all about efficiency, speed and effortlessness. I understand that AI has useful applications too, but for the life of me—I just can't share the sentiment that people strip away the creation process of creating and call themselves creators.

Why would I want to bother reading a book that no one bothered to write?

The quote above perfectly summarizes the problem that I have with Generative AI. It does a wonderful job taking the fun out of creating something by removing the part were you actually create something. Just writing these words feels incredibly dumb. In the end, you outsource the process of creation to a computer programme and then actually call yourself a creator? What.

It's not really enjoyable to make music now. [...] It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

These are the famous words of Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, a Generative AI tool that lets you create catchy music using nothing more than a prompt. According to him, all the music producers out there hate their jobs, hate to create, hate to make music. If I were a music creator, I'd feel deeply offended.

Personally, I don't feel comfortable handing off my craft—writing—to a machine. It's nonsensical, idiotic even. Why would I want my passion taken away from me?
Something I do everyday, because I love to do it.
Something I'm trying to become better at by practicing it vigorously.
Something that helps me put my mind in order.
Something that inspires and touches the lives of others.
Feel free to do my dishes, my laundry or vacuum-clean my living room. But write for me?

It hurts me to see that we are making our lives so effortless when it comes to something that it supposed to be effort, supposed to take time, supposed to make us grow. But today, it seems, we are going in a different direction. I can only be hopeful that people will value authenticity over artificiality, and in the end, creators—people, not machines—who honstely love to create something, will win the day.