By Andrew Wilson
Hey, my fellow writers, artists, photographers, and everyone else who has had an original thought. Everything is going to be alright; you’re not getting replaced by AI. In fact, you might become more valuable than ever.
As an art educator for the past couple of years, I’ve been hearing folks give my students advice like “give up on your art!” and “learn a trade!” because AI is coming to replace you. The idea being you got to do something practical with your hands, or a computer will do it better than you. The truth is this: all the jobs are trades. The only difference is that we creatives have been leaving our favorite bikes unlocked on the street waiting to be stolen. Things are about to change, though. The bikes will be locked in garages soon.
Since I’m a hunter, I like to think in terms of land. Right now, all the data is on public land, like the American land grab of the late 19th century; you can go out and grab whatever you want. Shooting all the trophy bucks and prize buffalo in the process. Yet soon it’s all going to be either preserved in a national park or bought up and privately protected.
Every time you have a good idea and upload it online to share (for the likes), you’re throwing it in the public pot. But companies and institutions are getting wise. They are withholding, and you should too.
The Public and Private Land of Data
Colleges and universities are already starting to fence off large parts of their intellectual property. If you’re part of their system, you have access. They are still using an AI system to sift through all their information, but it’s not allowed to use anything outside their plot of land. These companies and universities are going to start hoarding their data like jewelry in bank vaults. If you want in, you’ll have to pay a fee or figure out a way to steal.
Say you’re working on a scientific paper about something super important and life-changing, and you want to use AI to help you with research. Well, you can use a public AI (public land) and get the leftover garbage that everyone is fighting over. Or you can pay a fee to access private AI systems (hunting ranches) and get at the real trophies. The private AI will be like a hunting guide; the data vault will be premium private land. People will even have little private AI systems for their own house; you’ll feed it all your photos and anything else you want to keep, kind of like a home garden plot in your backyard. Your private AI will be like a butler keeping it organized and safe.
Take a company like Disney; they have a huge archive of raw artistic data. Millions of drawings, storyboards, scripts, and other creative goodies. They have no interest in releasing any of that gold to the public, but they might still be motivated to run it through an AI system to generate new content. What they’ll do is cordon it off and have their own AI dig through it, collaging it into something new. Imagine going to Disneyland to buy a souvenir drawing of your favorite characters. The drawing will be AI-generated, but it will come with a certificate of authenticity stating it was created by the special Disney Studios AI system, which you can’t get elsewhere. They already do this with their Disney-certified artists. Every company will do this, and each will have its own watermark. There will be Amazon AI products, Louis Vuitton, Paramount Studios, everyone.
Okay, so what? I’m an artist; it sounds like I’m still getting replaced by AI. Well, you might have noticed that everything AI-generated (especially images) is getting kind of stale. The system needs new raw materials to work into new combinations, and it gets them when people upload their creations on the internet. AI can only get smarter if it keeps reading. Imagine how dumb you’d be if you stopped reading in 5th grade. Same with AI; it needs more.
High Fence Your Data
It’s time to withhold. Every time you write a poem, take a photo, or make a drawing, you might consider keeping it away from the internet. Soon, companies and institutions will pay you for creative work to drop into their data reservoir. YouTube and other sites already do this by paying people who make popular content, but we need to make ourselves more exclusive. AI systems need a constant feed of new content to create unique combinations. It’s like putting a food plot on private land; they’re trying to attract the biggest and best trophy bucks. No feed dispenser, no trophies. Stop giving them the feed.
Just like the American frontier was divided into parcels with barbed wire, companies are figuring out how to divide cyberspace with digital fences. And they’re keeping the best game on their land with lush vegetation to feed off. If the land isn’t cultivated with fresh nutrients, it will die out and produce nothing of value. It’ll become a desert wasteland. So, companies and universities will have to recruit talent to build a database of exclusive content, just like in the old days, when newspapers kept a bullpen of writers. The free access period for creative content will end. Very smart people are figuring out how to prevent theft and encourage exclusivity. Every time you make something cool, consider keeping it to yourself, unphotographed, existing only in analog. The technology to protect it is coming.
You are irreplaceable. The robots aren’t going to go out and make a beautiful charcoal drawing of a model or use a view camera to capture how the light plays over the Grand Canyon, scribble a poignant story in a lonely diner, or describe the feeling of carving a canyon road on a Ducati. You need to go out and do that sort of thing. You need to go out and experience real adventure.
Afterward, you can decide whether to feed the machine and make a buck or two in the process. It’s going to be okay; your perspective is valuable. You are human; go act like it.
