My four-year old son wants a dog. He wants to name it “Singo” after the dog in his favourite Swedish cartoon Alfons Åberg. My two-year old daughter also wants a dog and wants to name it “dog”.
I learn a lot from my young children about the early workings of cognition. How they reason, how they compute, how they produce language. It’s humbling, entertaining and gives me priceless insight into the workings of the human brain. Children are like little versions of machine learning. Always watching, learning, imitating, advancing.
They anchor their world views in the contexts and intent-based outcomes which we feed into them, for example to be good, kind, creative, and caring. They’re young and are still yet to endure the many various rites of passage which will one day inform who they become as fully-formed human beings – allowing them to reason, compute and produce language based on their own past experiences.
After all, this is what makes us unique, isn’t it?
Humans vs. machines: The war on media
Today, we humans are entrenched in a phoney war of sorts with AI content creation bots.
As a human who works in communications, it should make me nervous. But the truth is, if machines can do a better job than us, then who are we to stop them? Shouldn’t we encourage a society where the best woman, man or machine gets the job?
In its latest Connected Intelligent Machines report, Ericsson tested eight media creation concepts across consumer technology early adopters in several major cities, to see which content we preferred. Some of the content was created by humans, some by the machines.
The results prompted cause for celebration across both sides. A surprisingly low one in five consumers said that they prefer human over AI content creation in more than half of the concepts tested. However, the same number prefer AI content creation over humans. A stalemate, for the time being. Whichever way you look at it, the trend points to a total machine takeover of the future content creation market, meaning that machine will inevitably be able identify and satisfy content demand better than we humans.
But what about machine creativity? As humans, how we reason, compute and communicate reveals a rich tapestry of our own experiences and conceptualizations. It informs who we are, and it fuels our creativity. Will machines ever be able to match that creativity and continually push us into new artistic genres? Will machines ever be able to think like we humans?
I create, therefore I am
In his 1949 Lister Oration, the esteemed professor Sir Geoffrey Jefferson became one of the first to question the creative prowess of these so-called mechanical men, in which he argued:
“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain — that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.”
However, a year later in his groundbreaking paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the father of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, dismissed this argument as being purely solipsist:
“According to the most extreme form of this view, the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking”. The truth is, machines don’t necessarily need to think like humans because they are, quite literally, wired differently. They simply need to be able to imitate humans.
In the same paper, Turing first proposed his imitation game or Turing test as it is known today, which provided the means to measure the human-like nature of intelligent machines. The test, which is based on human-machine interaction through an intermediary, is still used today to help set the benchmark of today’s connected intelligent machines.
Here’s how consumers think connected intelligent machines could transform everyday life.
The imitation game: AI content
So, consumers predict that mass media will increasingly be influenced by automation by 2030. The future, in fact, could be closer than we think.
Last year, OpenAI rolled out the beta version of its GPT-3 language generator, which many are calling the greatest leap yet toward human-like AI content creation. It has even been demonstrated to be very effective in producing fast media forms such as poems, fan fictions, press releases, pop songs, rap songs, technical manuals and even this entire article which featured in The Guardian last year.
As impressive as it is (and it is very impressive), developers are already finding that it does not quite pass the Turing test, indicating that we still have some technological distance to travel before we can truly imitate human intelligence.
And even the most basic AI language generators – even though they may not stand up to a lengthy Turing test – have proved a good enough imitation on social media platforms. The rise of fake news on social media and the many existential questions it has raised show that AI content creation, like any other technology, can be used as a proxy for negative or malicious intent. That’s why, as humans, we have a responsibility to ensure that responsible AI is built on trustworthy and ethical AI principles.
Content and creativity: human after all?
But where do we stand when it comes to slower, more subjective and studied art forms?
Well, it’s good news for us. For the time being, consumers still favor humans when it comes to music, with 65 percent saying they prefer humans as writers and performers of pop music. However, the Connected Intelligent Machines report also finds that six in ten of us believe that artificial musicians will be able to outperform humans in the hit charts by 2030 – just imagine something similar to the now-retired French machine-human hybrid Daft Punk.
We humans have actually been using computer science to augment music making for decades. Even Turing himself used his 1951 digital computer to generate music. Bowie was also an early proponent of AI songwriting which he said “…[gave] a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other". Today, there are many examples of musical artists teaming up with machines to create new genres of AI music.
The report also finds that today’s consumers consider movies, like music, a domain for human creativity, with six in ten consumers saying they would prefer human movie producers compared to AI counterparts. However, most of those respondents are seemingly unaware that AI is already used in the movie industry to augment human decision making. Another perfect example of humans and machines living and working in harmony, no?
Future of content creation
So am I nervous? Content is just as much about creativity as it is automation, and as long as that remains the formula, I believe there will always be a starring role for the human in future content creation. That’s because creativity is seldom a solitary pursuit, but rather a collaborative effort.
As Michael Björn, Head of Research Agenda at Ericsson’s Consumer Lab and author of the Connected Intelligent Machines report, says: “The future of content creation is indeed collaborative, but I believe that creators who collaborate with AI will have an edge. One interesting area where this is already happening on a mass market level is in science fiction writing. The famous Chinese SF author Chen Qiufan recently won a Shanghai literary competition against contestants like Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan with the short story “The State of Trance” that included AI generated passages.”
So, who knows, when our children grow up, it could well be that they have their favorite human-machine musical artist, or favorite human-machine author. That could all be within the realm of possibility.
Explore more
Read the Ericsson Connected Intelligent Machines report.
Read the Ericsson AI story.
Read Michael Björn’s earlier posts:
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March 25, 2021 at 06:04PM
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Future of content creation: Humans or machines? - Ericsson
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