I recently got back into writing some poems. The Dove (Forevermore) was fun to write. After the fact, I tried getting ChatGPT to create something similar. I only tried once before declaring victory.
Why is this poem meaningful to me? Because it has my soul in it. It’s the summation of my experience as a parent. Should you find it interesting, perhaps that’s why.
Reading The Best of Edgar Allen Poe recently I’m amazed (besides how depressing he is) at how excellent a writer he is. He peers into the mind and soul and extricates anything interesting. It’s interesting because a human wrote it.
Do we still paint, even if a camera can take a picture? Do we still ride bikes and horses even with cars and things? Do we still read even though we have TV and movies?
Words. Creative expression. They will always be interesting to us. Humans are interesting to us. Stories. Social acceptance is a fundamental human need. We desire connection. We’ll like reading something because a human wrote it.
But what about that guy I heard about who makes a ton of money using ChatGPT to create fake digital books on Amazon. People don’t know it’s AI-written. Digital GenAI images now are insanely accurate - it’s only 2024. It’s very possible great AI art will inspire us more than non-AI art (whatever that means because everyone uses photoshop anyway).
I’m not saying we won’t find value in AI art (creative writing, digital, video, etc.). We will. It’s clear we’ll have a really hard time knowing what’s human vs not.
But I am saying that creativity will never disappear. We’re always going to be interested in creating - even if machines can do it better. Machines can beat us at Go and StarCraft (AI Robots are mastering tasks faster than humans), but we’ll still play. Because what else will there be to do?
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Bryan lives somewhere at the intersection of faith, fatherhood, and futurism and writes about tech, books, Christianity, gratitude, and whatever’s on his mind. If you liked reading, perhaps you’ll also like subscribing: