If you have spent some time working with AI you may have had an experience like Peter J. Cobb, who wondered if ChatGPT and Midjourney could assist archaeologists, only to find that it seems to have potentially limited use cases for their own purposes. So, then how are people calling for this to change everything? Automation strikes again with invention, advancement, and rapid proliferation of Generative AI (GAI). We have experienced  these changes in the past with the first massive automation push 100 years ago prompting incredible invention, backlash, thinking, activism, and destruction. The first major automation cycle had us questioning what we will do, while the latest incarnation has us asking who we are. AI may replace some forms of human labour, the thing of Terminator nightmares. In this issue, AbuMusab argues that current concerns about job loss ignore past injustices regarding the replacement of blue collar jobs inferring that we place a higher value on intellectual skill. If this is the case, do artists and creatives have more to lose?

Past waves of automation have focused on specific jobs or classes of jobs; this round it seems as though nothing is safe. Even worse, education is potentially under threat. The authors in this issue argue that the rampant anthropomorphizing of AI is both misguided and harmful. It is powerful software, but we continue to lend it more power, and to those who would champion it further. It should be clear that "image generators are not artists".

In writing on the vicissitudes of copyright law in relation to AI, Sarp Kerem Yavuz turns to artist Jon Rafman who states that denying copyright to all works generated by AI will be seen as old-fashioned, that AI is a tool and artists are meant to create with contemporary tools and have ownership over their creations. His determination that the backlash against AI generated art points to the fetishization of labour-intensive artworks challenges those of us who fear what AI is bringing to the creative industries. Nevertheless, Jason Parham suggests that “Even at its most artificially generated, art can perhaps still be a portal, colonizing our fantasies and serving as a bridge between today and a better, stranger tomorrow.” Over the past 100 years the Art world has moved away from physical items to performance and digital art forms, and more without corporeal form. We have had to invent technology in order to prevent a core tenet of computers, which is that copying is effectively unlimited and lossless.

During an undergraduate thesis course last year, as ChatGPT was emerging, Adam asked students if they wanted to learn to use ChatGPT to help them write their thesis document. The next week they reconvened and emphatically declined, stating that it helped them get their work done quickly but it couldn’t produce writing that sounded like them. The preservation of the identifiers of their identity and humanity were more important than the expediency. At the end of the course, the class revisited the issue and the students were happy to have worked through the process.

Deepfakes and misinformation provide a real threat, but also a chance to reevaluate fundamental assumptions about how we determine truth and establish trust. When we use an AI tool and it produces something thoughtful, is that thought in the reader or was it thought by the machine? Or was it that the machine made a complex manipulation of a massive set of symbols from an input in related symbolic form. Could beauty lie in the expression of the prompter to elicit something relevant, or perhaps new, from the machine of riches. Will we all become prompt engineers? Perhaps we will finally have the ability to enhance photos, as promised by Blade Runner and many sci-fi romps thereafter, but hopefully that is the only resemblance

- Adam Tindale and Caroline Seck Langill, OCAD University