Sue Walsh (Principal, Design at SYP and faculty at School of Visual Arts) on what is lost when we use AI:
Forty-five thousand years ago, someone drew a pig in a cave. Today we have a “rainbow everything with presents and strawberries and cats” by GPT and my four year old daughter. Making is fundamentally human. AI is an accelerant, churning out stuff that is useful, fast and easy. But does it produce meaning beyond utility? I can see AI's creeping influence on what we create (or prompt) and share, marching towards a visual monotony, making our individuality opaque. Van Gogh once said, “The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.” Would his relationship to creating art be different if he used “the right prompt”, rather than laboring through each day, finding his salvation through creating his art? If we outsource the act of making to AI, we must question what we are losing along the way.
