A conversation about the impact of generative AI on the art world, exploring ethical considerations, diverse global perspectives, and the evolving relationship between AI and art.
Guest: ✨ Alex Shvartsman, Anthologist / Editor, UFO Publishing, Caezik SF&F [@arcmanorbooks]
On LinkedIn | https://www.alexshvartsman.com
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/AShvartsman
Website | https://www.alexshvartsman.com
On Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/shvartsman.alex
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
In this captivating episode, Marco Ciappelli hosts a dialogue with Alex Schwartsman, focusing on the transformative role of generative AI within the art sphere. Together, they navigate the ethical landscapes, global influences, and the pressing need to discern handcrafted artistry from its AI-generated counterparts. This in-depth discussion ventures into AI's footprint across various artistic domains, including visual arts and literature, examining its broader impacts on the art industry.
Alex sheds light on his anthology, a compilation that spans the globe, showcasing a spectrum of creative endeavors that confront the challenges and prospects birthed by AI in art. The discourse is framed to foster a diverse exploration of viewpoints, urging listeners to partake in a thoughtful examination of AI's burgeoning partnership with artistic expression.
With Alex's variegated background as an anthologist, writer, and game designer, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, enriching the conversation with insights into art's dynamic evolution amidst technological advances. The duo goes into the ethical dilemmas posed by AI in art and the implications for traditional creators, advocating for a societal appreciation for the irreplaceable value of human-made art.
This episode extends an open invitation to our audience to ponder over AI's expanding role in art, sparking a reflective mindset on this pressing issue. Wrapping up with the promise of further discussions with Alex, the episode underscores the ongoing relevance and complexity of this intersection between technology, creativity, and moral principles, setting the stage for future explorations into this fascinating topic.
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Resources
Future Science Fiction Digest: https://www.future-sf.com
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Discussing the art of intelligence and the true meaning of creativity: Generative AI's Impact on Creative Professions | A Conversation with Alex Shvartsman | Redefining Society with Marco Ciappelli
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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[00:00:00] Marco Ciappelli: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Redefining Society podcast. And I kind of, I kind of stumbled there because, uh, before we started recording, I was very indecisive doing this as a Redefining Society podcast or an audio signals because it includes a conversation about generative AI. It includes It includes creative profession and, uh, and how the future and the present looks like, or it may look like, when, um, when we, we accept or refuse or interact maybe with generative AI and only, uh, Time will tell.
It has been. It seems like it's been around forever, but it's been just over a year that we actually started having access to it and a lot of things happen. So, uh, again, if you're listening on redefining society, that's what it is. If you're listening on audio signal. Well, that's what it is anyway. So, uh, just follow both.
Today with me there is Alex Schwarzman. I hope I pronounced it correctly. I always double check on that because being Italian I misspelled names many times, but I think I got it right this time. So without further ado, Alex, welcome to the show.
[00:01:17] Alex Shvartsman: Thank you very much for having me. And yes, you got it exactly right.
[00:01:20] Marco Ciappelli: There you go. I'm very proud of myself for that. Um, so very excited about this conversation because again, it touches on some of my passion, which one is technology lately, generous UAI. Both, uh, from, uh, visual, then writing, and, you know, I play a little bit with that myself. And, uh, storytelling, because you are a storyteller, a writer at heart.
So, I would love for you to introduce yourself to, to my audience with, uh, whatever bio you decide. I know you have some card gaming history as well, so, whatever you want.
[00:02:01] Alex Shvartsman: So, my name is Alex Schwartsman. Uh, I am a writer. Anthologist, translator, game designer, uh, so I've worn many, many creative hats, uh, and I think that if I had to describe myself in one line, it would be a collector of those hats.
Uh, I always kind of chase the next new interesting creative thing that I want to try because it's just fun. Um, so I've had, uh, over 120 short stories published, uh, that are science fiction and fantasy stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies. I won an award. I was nominated, uh, for several other awards, uh, for, you know, for that writing.
Uh, I have three fantasy novels out. Um, the lead is being Cuckistocracy, which is an urban fantasy novel set in New York City, where I live. Uh, and I've edited over a dozen anthologies, uh, the most recent of which is the one that we're talking about today. Uh, and that's an anthology about the interaction of AI and art.
And so, of course, that became a very, um, interesting and, uh, uh, exciting subject. Uh, certainly a way in which society is getting redefined, uh, over the course of the past year. And that conversation has continued to be, uh, on the forefront, uh, for many technologists, for many creatives. And so, I was really fascinated with the attitudes and the ideas that some of the best, uh, Uh, science fiction writers across the globe could, uh, could bring to an anthology like that.
Uh, so I began scrambling and putting together a team and publisher and all the, you know, all the boring details of producing a book, uh, in order to have this happen while the subject was still very, very hot. And so the book was published early last year, I'm sorry, uh, late last year, I should say. Uh, and the good thing about it as well is that the individual stories from it can all be read for free.
So if this conversation interests the listeners, they can go to future sf. com and sample the stories there. And then if they like them, they can go and buy the book and ebook and print formats just about anywhere that you shop for books.
[00:04:10] Marco Ciappelli: Very cool. And that's something we usually say at the end. There are notes for the podcast so you can get in touch with Alex, but This time we just said at the beginning, that's totally cool.
So let me start with this because you know my being creative Yeah, a little bit of writing, but mostly, you know branding advertising. So interested in art and What you said collect all of those hats, I think in somehow it applies to me as well Uh, maybe not not as many as you. Um, so with that in mind the first question I want to ask you is your first reaction when you start Have you ever seen what AI was capable the moment I imagine like CHAT GPT became available or the Google alternative to that BART or so on like your first instinct as a creative person, but also somebody that talk about the future sci fi and your background?
Was it like, Oh, or cool?
[00:05:14] Alex Shvartsman: Well, my first reaction was excitement for sure. Uh, I think that the, the OO parts come later when you start digging into the implications and we'll discuss that throughout the podcast. But my first reaction was absolutely, oh my god, I did not expect that. Uh, a robot to be able to do that.
And my interaction was first with Midjourney. Midjourney became a sensation probably just a few months before CHAT GPT. And it was astounding how good it was at generating art, at generating, you know, pretty images. Now, whether they are art, uh, is up for debate, but they're very pretty images and it was able to, uh, you know, programs like that existed before, like Wall E and some others, but they were just not very good at all.
And Mid Journey absolutely leapfrogged, uh, all of them and it was producing stunning, stunning results. So, uh, the first thing that you think about as a science fiction reader, writer, uh, adjacent person is that, Hey, This entire time, we always envisioned a future where a bunch of robots would do menial tasks.
and free us up to draw, write, do all the creative things that people kind of in the utopia type society, uh, would have all the time in the world to do. And instead, we're all of a sudden, we're facing a scenario where it is the robots that are doing the that are creating the book, you know, the books they're writing, you know, or generating their own texts.
They're generating images at an astounding speed and at a quality that at least approximates a real professional artist. Something that most of us couldn't do without years of training. Meantime, uh, we're the ones doing the menial works that we imagined the robots would be doing. So the thing, uh, you know, the, the real, uh, life is completely flipped over.
You know, it completely flipped the script. You know, instead of the flying cars, we now have You know, robots creating all of this artwork and deep fake images and, and all sorts of stuff that we never thought robots would, uh, would be doing, or at least most of us haven't. While we're still stuck with the, you know, being waiters and, uh, you know, and, and, and doing all sorts of menial work, even though of course in real life, um, there are Applications where AI or large language models will be able to help us with those menial tasks down the road.
But that's not the first thing you see. You see the big shiny thing.
[00:07:46] Marco Ciappelli: I love how you just took, uh, in a way you kind of took the telescope and you flip it. And you look at from the other angle and then you show things instead of closer, you're sort of far away or inverted in a way. That's kind of like the visual I got, but it makes you think.
I mean, I agree with you and definitely part of the conversation is, is, is that art? Like what qualifies art? And we can definitely go there. Um, yeah. What is the, in general, I mean, you interacted with other writers, this is an anthology and the question is about the interaction between AI and art.
Do you feel like it leans more on one side, like, uh, no, no, this is bad, or it feels, or is more on the other side where more creative are welcoming that? Because I kind of see the two opposite and few people like me that try to stay in the middle and say, well, good luck. There is the good and there is the bad.
[00:08:48] Alex Shvartsman: So among the creative community, uh, it is overwhelmingly seen as a negative, uh, not perhaps the underlying technology, but how, uh, the technology is being applied. Uh, so first of all, uh, no matter whether, uh, this is a correct, uh, stance or an illogical stance, it is absolutely reasonable to expect that people who are in fear of losing their jobs, to, to this new technology, uh, to dislike it.
I mean, that's how we got the Luddites back in the day, right? Uh, Luddites were not in fact against technology. They were in fact against how the technology was being utilized and used to essentially eliminate their jobs, pay them less money, et cetera. So, uh, we are in a way, the modern Luddites in that many creatives, uh, kind Adopted this very negative outlook on what's coming in the future.
Uh, the artists were affected first because the artists are, you know, feel like they're losing work, especially commercial illustrators, people who, uh, are not necessarily drawing paintings that will go up on the walls of some fine gallery. But, you know, they're doing book covers, they're doing interior artwork and things like that, uh, which already We're relatively low paying jobs when it comes to creative output.
And so people who couldn't afford or barely could afford to hire them in the first place were among the first to eagerly jump on the train of, well, I can have something almost as good for free. If I just, you know, input a bunch of, uh, prompts into mid journey or similar program. So the artists are the ones that got affected first.
Uh, the other creatives, the writers, they see. The writing on the wall, pardon the pun, uh, and they, they kind of feel, well, uh, CHAT GPT, Gemini, all of these, uh, large language models, they actually are absolutely terrible at writing. They write about on par with a fifth or sixth grader, uh, you know, essay, which is why it's such a big problem for teachers as well, because kids are using it to cheat on their school assignments.
And it's hard to tell since That's the level of writing that AI is currently capable of, but we're also conscious of the fact that it's only been, as you said in the introduction, it's only been a year. Who is to say that two, three, five years from now, you're not going to have such a significant advancement in, in their capabilities that you will be able to have a AI spit out a book that is on par with the writing by A competent writer and then where we'll be, uh, now for the ontology, I did not want every single story to kind of, uh, illuminate the doom and gloom of the situation.
I wanted a variety of perspectives and opinions, and I wanted the, uh, writers to do what we do best, uh, to think deeply about the upcoming technologies and how they will influence the world and come up with scenarios that are not obvious. And so not every story in the book views this forthcoming technology as a negative.
There are definitely, uh, positive scenarios. There are neutral scenarios. So there's every kind of like approach imaginable. And that's exactly how I want it because, uh, you don't want, like, if you get an album, you don't want every song to kind of strike the exact same note, right? And that's true of anthologies as well.
You want a variety of perspectives. You want some stories to be funny. Some stories to be dark, uh, some stories to be optimistic, et cetera.
[00:12:24] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. If we go back to the vinyl, I would say you want every album to have a lot of singles in it, right? And some B sides, that's good too. Um, I, I love this perspective.
I, when I, when I saw the, the AI and the generative AI start playing with it at the beginning, I was like, wow, this is impressive. Write a song about, I don't know, a dog flying to the moon and rhyme the chorus and okay, make a poetry out of that in the style of Shakespeare. Cool. Then you start to ask it to become creative.
And that's where I found that At best, it was mediocre, and I'm saying at best, and I'm like, this is going to be good for those that don't really know how to write, that don't really know how to illustrate. It's gonna probably not take the job, but a really good one. But my question is, how do you become a good one if you don't get a chance to practice your, your skills in a way?
So how you, how the apprentice become the master was the big question in my head. So any feeling similar to that on your side?
[00:13:37] Alex Shvartsman: Well, most things are, that are worth doing. Take a lot of effort and a lot of practice and a lot of sweat equity before you become good at it. And it doesn't matter if you're an artist or an IT professional, it's years of experience that you put into it that make you very good at what you do.
Most people who end up and, and even before AI was a thing, right? Writers would very often encounter people who go like, Oh, when I retire, I'm going to write a And in a way that's a bit insulting, isn't it? It's kind of like me going to that person. Oh, yeah. Well, when I retire, I'm going to do accounting that you do now.
You know, it's not something you retire into. If you, if you want to do it, well, it's something that you put a lot of work and a lot of effort into learning how to do and then doing it months and months and months of work to write a quality book. So, uh, People who, uh, who are putting in prompts into mid journey or, or, or giving little prompts, like, like, like the one you mentioned, like, write me a song about dogs on the moon, um, they're not actually artists any more than, uh, somebody ordering a burger from a waiter as a chef.
Uh, they are using technology for fun, and there's absolutely no, nothing wrong with that. I think it's perfectly fine to use it for non commercial purposes, and it's a really, really great way to, uh, have technology help you be creative by brainstorming. So, for example, if I'm writing a scene, And I want to write a scene about a bunch of aliens fighting on, on space ships.
I can ask one of these bots to come up with, you know, with images that will might inspire something in my meat brain that's going to actually be creative and write something new about it, right? Uh, what I have a problem with is people who are looking to monetize it. And they actually think that, uh, being able to deftly input prompts that will generate a slightly better image.
Make some artists. It is a skill, just like using Photoshop is a skill, but using Photoshop does not make you an artist. Uh, you know, doing something creative with Photoshop. An artist can use Photoshop, but not everybody who uses Photoshop as an artist.
[00:15:51] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. And I think this is a good bridge to get into maybe what you, you think about define creativity and, and art, because it's a huge question.
It's, for me, it's by the meaning of life. When I look at it from a philosophical perspective, it is that important. Personally, I think, uh, experience. It's what you put into your art, it may be a painting, it may be Ansel Adams photography, it may be, you know, a director, the writer of a movie or a musician.
Um, clearly computers don't have that right now, right now, I don't know, in the future. Um, so what is, what is the definition? Um, for you about what makes art art.
[00:16:40] Alex Shvartsman: So, I mean, art is something that it's a creative process that an intelligence, uh, comes up with, uh, a very common misconception and it's big right into the name is that AI has intelligence,
[00:16:53] Marco Ciappelli: uh, mistake, wrong name.
Absolutely.
[00:16:57] Alex Shvartsman: Absolutely the wrong name. Down the line in the future, uh, the, you know, the goal, the ultimate goal of people who work in this technology is to create an actual thinking machine. Something, something that can have, make decisions, can, uh, not just emulate intelligence, but have intelligence. The things that we're using now, CHAT GPT, Mid Journey, all of these things, they are what's called large language models, LLMs.
Essentially, they're huge databases that crunch together. A lot of input, whether that input is images, text, uh, anything on the internet, huge, huge amounts of data. And they digitize that data and they turn it into numbers. And when you ask it a query, whether you ask it to draw a picture, whether you ask it to write a bunch of text, the answer that it generally gives you is to approximate the response that you would get from a human being by, you know, to, to a similar query.
So essentially its goal is to look as much like a real response as possible without actually, uh, trying to be accurate. And that's how you get. Uh, a weird number of fingers or details bleeding into the image that shouldn't be there because it doesn't actually think about these things. It's just generating using the datasets.
And also that's how you get, uh, the CHAT GPT and similar programs blatantly lying to you and giving you incorrect information. But it's doing so, uh, with a tremendous amount of confidence. Which then makes you think, well, that really sounds accurate. So for, for this book, when I was writing this book, I asked Bard and CHAT GPT to come up with my bio.
So I'd ask it to write my bio and the bio that it wrote to somebody who doesn't know me sounds perfectly plausible. Like if you don't know me, everything that it says, it doesn't say anything outlandish. It doesn't say that I'm a moon alien with three eyes. It doesn't say that, uh, you know, that I'm Lady Gaga.
It all sounds like something that could be plausible. Could I have gone to a university that they've mentioned? Uh, I think they said UPenn. Sure, I could have. I've never been to UPenn, but, uh, the, you know, the, it's plausible that I could have. Uh, could I have, uh, been published in anthologies or won the awards that it mentioned?
Sure, I could have. I didn't. But a person reading that, if you, if you were just to take that entry and say this came from Wikipedia and show it to somebody who doesn't know me, then Yeah, it would be plausible, but it is just not true, which, bringing, bringing it back to your original question, isn't that art, isn't that writing?
It's coming up with a completely fake thing that sounds legitimate. So, so that's why it's such a complicated question, because when AI gets to the point where they want it to get, which is to hallucinate, hallucinate information, that actually begins to approach very closely to the point where it's actually creating.
You know, when it's actually just what is just collating information and kind of generating, you know, putting data together, that's not creative. But once it invents new things that are not real, once it's lying to us. That in a way that is writing, I mean, maybe not very good writing, but writing,
[00:20:12] Marco Ciappelli: but it's still random, right?
I mean, I like the brainstorming because that probability Not knowing exactly why but it does make it sounds like it is Sometimes I may get the sixth finger as you said may put something weird that we just randomly we wouldn't never thought And then as an artist you can say hmm. That's kind of cool Let me let me take that and bring it to the next level But still the point is it's so random that I just can't justify the fact that that is art Um, but again that is at this moment.
Um, I don't know when will be the time that Then it has its own experience AI and then can write something based on what they experience a trip to to the moon and You know all 9 000 Or making a decision in that in that way Tell me a little bit more about the the ontology which I am so I love short story I my favorite things to read so I would definitely dig into that um any of these that I don't know completely blow your mind and I'm not asking you to name your favorite child, but something that stake more than than others that you want to share with the with the public.
So
[00:21:32] Alex Shvartsman: yeah, like you said, it's very hard to choose your favorites because I work with these authors and editors and stories and help kind of, you know, bring them into the world. So, so it's difficult to choose between them. What I will say is that I Wanted to make sure that there was a global perspective to this.
So many of the anthologies have kind of just the perspective that we expect, which is just a bunch of, you know, American middle class or upper middle class writers that are generally older, they're generally whiter, they're kind of, you know, You know, homogenous in a way. Right? So what I did is I went out of my way and worked with a lot of translators, worked with a lot of authors from across the globe.
And so we have stories, we have several stories from China. We have several stories from Ukraine. Uh, we have, uh, stories from South America and Madagascar and Sri Lanka and Japan. So it's a truly global perspective. And of course, I would also have to be conscious of the fact that we need to sell the book, which means you need to put big names on the cover.
And so we, we do have, uh, Hugo and Nebula winning authors in the book, like Ken Liu and Adrian Tchaikovsky and, uh, you know, fascinating TV writers like Jane Espenson, uh, you know, so they, they bring their perspectives to, to the book as well. Uh, perhaps. And again, it's not so much a matter of my favorite, but the story that I thought would stand the greatest chance of being nominated for awards out of this anthology is actually a story that was originally written something like 20 years ago, and it's also the longest piece in the book.
Uh, the story is called Prompt, and it's, uh, by Sergei and Marina Dechenko, uh, which is a pair of Ukrainian writers who, uh, are primarily known for writing fantasy, uh, and And they, uh, they ended up actually moving to the United States. So thankfully they were safe from the water and working in Hollywood for a number of years.
Uh, but the story was translated, uh, you know, for originally it was written in Russian and it was translated from Russian and it's a novella. So it's a pretty long story. Uh, and in this novella, the character of, you know, of Prompt is essentially an AI that runs a theater. And it auditions and decides which plays will be produced in this theater and given all the benefits and all the enhancements that AI is capable of to make them look much, much better than a regular human being, a regular human producer could do on their own.
And which ones are not worth the society's attention. So essentially, in this case, the AI is the curator rather than the creator. But the power of the curator, as somebody who is a curator of this anthology, is very important as well. Uh, so that's one, uh, fascinating perspective that I really, uh, like that we were able to, uh, get, get it translated and share it with Anglophone readers for the first time.
Uh, another story that really stood out to me, uh, was by one of the Chinese authors in the book. And, uh, they wrote a scenario where, uh, And AI was used to overlay beautiful images and art over the horrendous, uh, real life images of war for soldiers in combat. And so that way they were able to kind of maintain their sanity and, uh, be able to continue to go about their grisly work of warfare.
Uh, and I thought, you know, the story is called A Beautiful War, and I thought it was just a really interesting perspective and especially, uh, cogent today. So that's, uh, uh, so those are a couple of standouts. But again, I mean, it's so difficult to, uh, to choose because There, there are a great many different ideas and perspectives, and some of them are much closer to today where, you know, we're talking about stories that extrapolate from CHAT GPT and things like that, and what will happen in the next five years, ten years.
And some of these stories are centuries in the future with truly, uh, true artificial intelligences, and, um, kind of demonstrating how those would interact with our present.
[00:25:44] Marco Ciappelli: Wow. Uh, yeah, and I didn't want you to make choices between the many artists either. I was like, I wanted to know what you said, which like a couple of ideas that the writer came up with.
The ethical consequence of the one where the AI decide who is going to be going on story on stage, it's pretty much what we don't like about AI now, making decision for hiring, for giving a loan to someone or, you know, like, it's kind of like that the guardrail is use it to get to a conclusion, but don't let them Make the conclusion for you.
And yeah, he's not the creator, but he's also the one that decide who's gonna make it or Or not. So a lot to unpack there. It could be just one episode of Redefining Society just for that, for sure. Um, I'd like to take the last few minutes that we have here. And this is a large conversation. I'm really enjoying it.
I may ask you to come back eventually and touch on other aspects of the things that you do. But the fact that you said at the beginning that the artist was one of the few In terms of risk of losing jobs and, and, and so on, but also they are the one more affected because that's how the large model train themselves, um, on art from the past on visual art.
And that's why it's getting a lot of lawsuit coming from many. And, um, and I found that interesting. And the reason. And the specific question is, as artists, we all are, especially, you know, you guys, for example, that write this story, you're definitely affected, just to give an example, by I don't know, the Asimov, the Lovecraft and all, you know, this, this, uh, giant, uh, sci fi from the past.
And we all eventually get something. We, we become what we consume. Music can be the same thing. Um, director can be the same thing, cinematographer. How do you feel about that?
[00:28:13] Alex Shvartsman: So, there's a big difference here, right? And I actually write about this in the introduction to the ontology, uh, so, there, all of us, as artists, we learn from, from people who came before us, whether, whether by reading stories, by, uh, looking at artwork and emulating that art.
We learn from that, but then we eventually develop our own styles, and those, you know, the artists and the writers who stand out are people who add something unique to the conversation. The machines, the large language models, are incapable of truly learning. They can just mash things up. They can make a mixtape for it.
But they can't write a new song in, in, in, in a practical way that matters. So in of its own, I don't think that's necessarily a problem in the use cases that I've demonstrated earlier. So, you know, being able to brainstorm, being able to just come up with a, you know, funny cat picture to post on the internet, uh, you know, those are.
Theoretically anodyne, they're the harmless, but the problem is that in order to come up with a cat picture, the large language models, those databases are filled with copyrighted cat pictures created by humans. Which it then digitizes, meshes up and spits out some sort of correlation from that. So the people who created the original data that it's trade on are not in any way compensated.
Uh, and the argument that they make is, hey, uh, a bunch of tech bros stole our data and are now profiting from it without us seeing anything. Whether or not that actually bears out legally. Uh, is a question because you're going to have all sorts. I mean, we're just not ready. Like we have no case law that covers this whatsoever.
Uh, and even when we do have some kind of rulings, there's going to be different Countries and even different states where those rulings will be different. And so if Japan, for example, which seems to be very friendly to, uh, to LLMs for the moment, uh, if Japan says it's legal to train, uh, on any data set, uh, you know, that, that's, that doesn't break copyright law, then what is to stop these companies, uh, from just opening offices in Japan and continue what they're doing in Japan, even if United States, for example, says, no, you can't do that.
You have to pay the arts. So there's always the, you know, the genies out of the bag. You know, there's always going to be that ability to, uh, create these, you know, beautiful images that are based on stolen art. The question is, as a society, are we okay with accepting that? And so, for example, people who purchase, uh, you know, science fiction and fantasy and romance books are very strongly against, uh, any sort of AI being used as cover art.
And they will. Uh, just absolutely blast the publishers and social media and cancel preorders and otherwise react to a book that does that, of course, that hurts the author who has no control whatsoever over what is being used for their cover art, unfortunately, but it is a response that. Continues to get real artists hired and, uh, and employed.
Um, there, you know, there's also, uh, all sorts of other, you know, reactions that, that, that, that, you know, that, that we can have to this, uh, conventions. Uh, some of the largest Comic Con level conventions, in fact, DragonCon, which is one of the largest and it takes place in Atlanta every summer. Uh, they just announced that they will absolutely not allow any printouts of AI art sold at Comic Con.
Uh, at the convention so that, uh, only the real artists selling prints of their own art will be able to profit, but not the people who generated something in five seconds and then printed it, uh, you know, on a glossy paper from, you know, in a nice printer, but didn't actually create it. Uh, so I think that those approaches are actually better than the legal approaches in the law, than filing the lawsuits, because as long as, as a society, we refuse to accept Stuff that was not created by anyone.
Stuff that was just generated by, by an algorithm, uh, then that will create the opening for human creatives to continue to earn a living of some sort. You know, it's not, it's not a lot in most cases for, um, for people who write and create art, uh, but it'll continue, you know, giving, uh, giving us those, uh, um, you know, those opportunities that, Would otherwise, if ethics were completely taken out of equation, would otherwise just go to technology?
[00:32:52] Marco Ciappelli: It makes sense. And my question, I've done it a few times. I asked that question. It's definitely provocative and wanted to know what you think. I agree with you. Personally, a hundred percent. And the old debate about giving the copyright of something to the AI itself, you're really Probably thinking a little bit too much outside of the box, um, my opinion at this time, but the fact is this, and I'm going to come to the last question.
Remember, we leave the card, the playing card for leaving for when you come back, because I would love to have you back. Um, lately, I'm asking this question to redefining society. I always say, you know, we're constantly redefining society. The moment I The moment I finish, I think I had to redefine it because of technology, we have to redefine it again.
New social contract, new concept of privacy, identity, work, and all of that. What do you think it is the most important thing that we need to redefine at this time in our relationship with, with art and when it comes to artificial intelligence?
[00:34:03] Alex Shvartsman: I think we need to understand, uh, what is and isn't art. And this is, art has always been subjective, right?
Like we, you know, somebody places a banana in a, uh, uh, you know, in a case at a, at a museum and people go, okay, yeah, that's art, but it isn't. It's just somebody who left the banana behind. So art is in the eye of the beholder. And as a society, I think that we to, uh, kind of take steps toward appreciating.
Artisanal art, stuff that's actually created by human beings, uh, versus, uh, attempts at art that are being generated by computers, at least until a true artificial intelligence, uh, is created, emerges. And then, you know, I would love to see what an artificial mind that can think for itself and is not just regurgitating data has to say.
I would love to read that book or look at that painting, but I'm not so excited to look at. Uh, an artificially generated image that is just, uh, an amalgamation of human created artwork.
[00:35:07] Marco Ciappelli: Absolutely. That's, that's a really good point. So I think we let the audience with a lot to think about, uh, people that are interested in Playing around with AI and love reading.
And of course, I, I will dig into this for sure. And I recommend that, as we said at the beginning, links to, um, your website and where they can find this art will be on the notes. Uh, but again, uh, there is a lot to think about. Uh, it's okay to have different perspective, but I, I always encourage give it a go.
At least you can make your own. Perspective. Don't just go with the with the wave and and the flow. Um, because I do think that sometimes people just decide to say no to something without actually trying it and really figure out if it what you can't what it is and what is not, which has been at the core of our conversation.
What it is and what it's not. Alex, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.
[00:36:08] Alex Shvartsman: Thank you for hosting me and I, I appreciate the deep and intelligent conversations and just actually being able to dig into the, into some of these things, the perfect venue for that.
[00:36:16] Marco Ciappelli: Absolutely. I'd love to have you back and for everybody else, if you enjoyed the conversation, share it, subscribe. If you're watching the video, here we are saying goodbye. And if you're just listening again, share it. And, uh, and subscribe to audio, well, audio signals, if you're listening there and redefining society, if you're listening there, because, uh, I think it is perfect in both, uh, containers.
So again, goodbye, everybody. Thank you, Alex. I hope to have another interesting conversation with you soon.