OPINION - The under-30s aren’t going to swap real art for AI: trust me, I teach them

I didn’t always hate AI. As a boy in the 1980s, every toy I wanted was a robot, or robot-related; I spent nights on end programming my Commodore Plus 4 to recite the alphabet. But recently, in my day job as a creative writing professor, I’ve found myself so angry about it that I’d happily join an army against the grifters forcing it on us. We cannot allow AI to replace art and the creative process when AI companies have stolen all of our books to “train” the machines. It feels odd even to have to write a sentence like that when, for the majority of people, it goes without saying, but pro-AI propaganda has more money invested in it than anything else on the planet.

The tech industry has made a major PR blunder, though. Instead of presenting AI-generated art as an amusing parlour trick (a robot who can wear a hat and juggle and compose a passable sonnet — how charming!) they chose to overplay their hand and threatened human creatives and researchers with obsolescence. Why, they suggested, would we ever again bother staying up late into the night working on a tricky scene in our screenplay? Or practising our scales so we can one day play in an ensemble? Or having one more go at that acrylic of our beloved cat? The computers can do it! Think of the time we’ll save to do absolutely nothing in because life no longer has any meaning.

This, along with the horrendous cost to the environment and surrounding communities of their data centres, as well as their inexplicably awful personalities, feudal-era greed and fascist politics, and pirating the entire history of literature and art because copyright law somehow doesn’t apply here, has contributed to the radicalisation of an entire generation against them.

Cheap, convenient... crass

Its capabilities may be exaggerated, but it can’t be denied that AI has already done a lot of damage to the arts industries and individual careers. Many creative professionals, from translators to graphic designers to scriptwriters for video games, have lost their livelihoods. Corporations are using it more and more, however hideous the CG results, because it’s seen as cheap, instant and convenient. If a few hundred thousand artists starve, who cares?

stokkete - stock.adobe.com

The story might appear to be the same in universities; according to research by the Higher Education Policy Institute, overall AI adoption is more or less ubiquitous (92 to 95 per cent between staff and students). But in fact these statistics are misleading when you remember that you can’t even use a search engine or open a PDF without AI sticking its oar in. Forget for a moment the scare stories of students generating their essays with AI and receiving a degree without opening a book. In the arts and humanities this is very rare — as rare as plagiarism (I’ve dealt with precisely two cases of this in my 20-year career and taught roughly 3,000 students). Cheating like this tends to indicate a deeper problem the student is struggling with, and with some attention and advice they can usually be brought around to trusting their own voice and ideas.

We’re human and we’re all tempted to cut corners, but in my experience the vast majority of students who choose to study literature or writing do so out of a deep commitment to the work, a belief in the importance of human culture and history and an ambition to contribute to that with their own perspectives.

Rage against the machine

All is not lost: I’d like to tell the tech bosses what I see my students doing instead of using their overpriced, overrated and intellectually deadening tools: they spend hours on end working on 70,000-word novels; they perform at well-attended poetry nights; they write and produce stage plays; they start bands and compose music … They attend to the forms of culture that existed before we had electricity; the same ones that will survive even if the mismanagement and resource-wasting of AI sends us back to the pre-industrial age. In that eventuality, a lot of the art we make will probably be quite furious reflections on those responsible. I’d recommend Tim Winton’s recent novel Juice as a template. We see this rejection too in the public statements of successful young artists. The electronica composer and musician Fred Again recently reflected that the process of writing and making music is what makes it meaningful. “Giving the process bit to a machine would be intrinsically contrary to what I love about the whole thing.”

Art without humans is empty, meaningless, and ultimately damaging to the soul

A couple of years ago my own children were messing around with a song-generating app, writing obscene lyrics and setting them to AI-generated music. They got bored of it within an hour and have never used it since. Meanwhile, they practise their musical instruments every day, courtesy of the local education authority’s commitment to affordable music lessons. Because a child of 10, like the Pope, grasps naturally what the clueless pushers of AI technology don’t (or they’ve forgotten, or they’re deliberately playing dumb): “art” — or indeed craft or design — without humans is empty, meaningless, and ultimately damaging to the soul and our collective humanity. There has never been a more important time to assert this, passionately and repeatedly, and when I look at the example of my own students, facing an unstable future with imagination and integrity, I feel nothing but gratitude and hope.

Luke Kennard, a poet, novelist and professor, is at Wimbledon BookFest on October 18. His novel Black Bag (John Murray, £18.99), is shortlisted for the Booker Prize