AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.
…Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.
Like a programming language interpreter, GPT-3 translates the designer’s intent from a language they’re already familiar with (English) to one they need to learn (Figma’s information architecture, as manifested in its UI.) This can be easier for a new/busy designer, much like Python is easier and faster to work with than assembly language.
But that’s not “designing” — at least not any more than compiling Python code is “programming.” In both cases, all the system does is translate human intent into a lower level of abstraction. Sure, the process saves time — but the key is getting the intent part right. I’ll be convinced the system is “designing” when it can produce a meaningful output to a directive like “change the product page’s layout to increase conversions.”
We might be closer than we think to cures for depression, hypertension, and yes, even obesity.
The answer to scurvy was just one thing, plus a few wrinkles — mostly “not all citrus has the antiscorbutic property” and “most animals can’t get scurvy”. This was only difficult because people weren’t prepared to deal with basic wrinkles, but we can do better by learning from their mistakes.
This means don’t give up easily. It suggests that there is lots of low-hanging fruit, because even simple explanations are easily missed.
Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence might not actually be a contradiction — the real explanation might just be slightly more complicated than people realized. Go back and revisit scientific near-misses, maybe there’s a wrinkle they didn’t know how to iron out.