Will AI replace me? 🤡

“Human feelings and actions are too vast and complex for an AI to emulate,” says writer-comedian, Shashank Tiwari, who believes AI can never replace writers or their work.

But when someone says there’s a new AI tool in the market, I wonder if it’ll replace me and my work. I’m certain millions of writers and creators feel so. A simple Google search shows diverse articles that AI won’t replace you and it’ll only augment human intelligence. According to Text Cortex, 28% of companies already use AI for marketing purposes, but according to all work, AI will produce 97 million new employment opportunities by 2025.

And yet, we find ourselves asking this question every now and then. So, I figured let’s end this debate. 🤓

What can these AI tools do?

Pretty much everything we do — from designing and writing to fact-checking and making videos, but faster. Can you tell a human hasn’t designed or written these? Sometimes, but not always. Today, tools like Lex, DALL - E, Jasper, and DreamBooth cater to small businesses for their copy and design.

In fact your favourite LinkedIn creator may be using Taplio to create content. And you wouldn’t even know. 🤷‍♀️

Check out this Twitter thread.

Also sample this — you can sing a song and AI can transform your voice into Taylor Swift’s voice. Seriously you can produce a pop song right from your room; sure it takes effort but so does producing an actual song.

Recently, Meta has made an AI tool Make-A-Video, which as the name suggests makes videos. All you’ve got to do is enter text and the tool will make realistic, surreal, or stylized videos. I don’t know how I feel about them — honestly, they’re great but it made me feel like I was in a dystopian era.

A tool called Midjourney (which says it’s all about art in the age of artificial intelligence) has a Discord server with bots, and when you enter text, the bots design images.

Talking about replacing humans…

Visual designer Ketki Jadhav says, “At least at the moment, I don't think AI can replace humans/designers but they might change the way we design. We can use it as a collaborative tool, but creativity will always stem from a human mind. Even today when we use Midjourney, the generated images are a result of the prompt that we feed. The more creative the prompt the more amazing the results. Sometimes AI does not produce what you have in mind, so that's a drawback. Additionally, it doesn't take into account social cues, filter biases, or even create original content.”

Ketki further adds, “It indeed affects jobs as it’s time and cost-efficient. A lot of people can just use Canva today instead of hiring a designer. But then again every creative looks the same. I have used a lot of writing tools too and they just can't understand the context or the emotions that I would like to convey through my writing.”

This is also one of my primary problems with Grammarly, which never understands emotion. And what’s writing without emoting, right? Content consultant Paulami Sen says, “Because some AI tools are poised to be really good, I feel like we’ve got to change with the times and evolve in our writing in a way that AIs maybe can’t match us. Still unsure what that evolution as writers might require.”

Another interesting video I watched is by Corridor Crew and if they think AI will lead to a decline in VFX artists? 👇

I decided to give it a shot myself and grabbed an invite from Dharmesh Ba, who explains his experience with LEX (an AI writing tool) here. I asked LEX a straightforward question: Will AI replace me, and wrote the first three sentences, and here’s how LEX completed the remaining part. 👇

I’ll give it to LEX — it’s precise, grammatically correct, and logical. But it’s too well put-together and doesn’t emote like that of an actual writer. I am sure the tool can do better if I pick another topic. But can we say these tools rescue us from writer’s block? Or would that be plagiarism? Tell me in the poll below.

Canva too introduced an AI text-to-image generator (beta), and when I typed a ‘golden retriever eating a donut’ and ‘a hen on top of a riverside hut with mountains in the background, these were the results. 👇

While the retriever looks alright, the hen one doesn’t have the hut as specified in the text. 👇

I know it’s only a beta version, but then it made me go meh. 🤷‍♀️ But that doesn’t mean AI is incapable of making art or generating images. At the Colorado State Fair, Jason M. Allen won as an emerging digital artist, but his art was generate on Midjourney. For very obvious reasons, this stirred a storm on the internet, and all that Allen had to say was, “I’m not going to apologize for it. I won, and I didn’t break any rules.”

Read the full report by The New York Times here.

Artist and illustrator Sri Priyatham says, “This has been under a debate for a while now, but surely many brands will replace artists with AI based on their requirements. This could be due to lack of a budget or not realising the value of personalised art, and it’s a potential threat to a small community of artists. I also don’t think AI art is exactly art — people can’t call themselves as AI artists because they enter a combination of words to produce an image. I hope AI doesn’t replace artists and people don’t forget real art and its value.”

Also watch: VFX artists compete against AI

Creators are going nowhere — but with AI and creators constantly learning and broadening their game, the competition is a given. Now we have to compete with other creators and computers, and from the looks of it, AI will really push us to get better and not become obsolete.

And this brings me to my conversation with Shashank, who said AI cannot replace me. But a clown surely can! 🤡

— Sunaina Patnaik

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