Despite the almost daily development in programs and applications of artificial intelligence (AI), it is impossible to abandon the human creator, experts in the fields of technology, literature and the arts have said.
In exclusive statements to Qatar News Agency (QNA), the experts said that the AI programs help create creative works such as writing stories, novels and poems, but it cannot match the capacity of human mind. It can help in preparing textual content of various types whether they are directed texts for social platforms, scientific research, articles, blogs, and many more, but it will not eliminate the presence of human creators.
With the accelerating pace of technological development in the field of AI and according to the latest studies, these programs have been supported by using text databases from the Internet, including books, magazines and Wikipedia texts, where 300 billion words have been entered into the system. One of the most popular AI programs like Chat GPT can on request provide text that appears as if it was written by a human writer. Perhaps one of the most important examples that confirm the success of AI programs in creative writing is what Canadian science fiction author Tim Boucher mentioned in the New York Post newspaper that he was able to write 97 small books in less than a year based on AI programs. This huge development in the techniques and production of AI programs prompted us to ask the question about the negative effects of such programs and their impact on creative or research writing as well as on design and various arts.
Dr. Ahmed Abdelali, senior software engineer at Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, told QNA that AI models by training computers with learning algorithms use data of very large sizes. This data contains all the content of the Internet in addition to many digitized books. These statistical models or that use of neural networks remember the graphic methods and linguistic structures and from that they save this information, adding that in the case of generating these models, the stored information is used and therefore these models cannot be described as intelligence.
Despite the ability of these models to remember as well as interact, they remain within the scope of what is known. Hence, the outputs of such algorithms cannot be described as creativity, he said, adding many may object to this and cite examples such as Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018) which sold for more than 432 thousand dollars. But this painting was the result of training a model of neural networks using more than 15,000 paintings between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. In contrast to this, these algorithms can generate new ideas that the writer has never guess it before. With the help of machine learning and natural language processing algorithms, AI can analyze vast amounts of textual data to identify patterns and themes, where it can generate new ideas for stories and novels that a human author might not have thought of.
Abdelali continued that AI programs will remain the loyal assistant to researcher in scientific topics to help him arrange his ideas and output them in a consistent template. But researcher must carry out experiments and extract their results, and these programs can be used in the literary field to improve writing or speed up the process of writing and directing, he said, pointing to several technologies and models: (Alpaca (Stanford University), LLaMA (Meta)), GPT4All Nomic.ai, BLOOM BigScience, Cerebras-GPT Cerebras, GPT-J EleutherAI, indicating that these programs are open source, meaning that all the information that was used in training them is available to everyone and most of them use similar methods and may differ in the volume of data used as well as the training period, neural network architecture and the number of transactions used.
For his part, Data and AI Regional Lead at Microsoft Middle East Eng. Chady Haddad echoed in a similar statement to QNA that Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in solving complex economic challenges, bringing a quantum leap in many businesses by improving enterprise performance and customer experience and developing forecasting and planning capabilities. They are also used in workplaces, home offices, academic institutions, research laboratories, and manufacturing facilities around the world to help improve and enhance the lives of all groups of society, from students, teachers, farmers, software developers to security professionals. AI is useful in various areas such as energy, health care, financial services, education, and others.
The world has witnessed a series of technological revolutions with the launch of computers, mobile phones, smartphones, the Internet, and the cloud each changing our world, our business, and our lives. Now, the AI revolution will move our world to a new unprecedented developmental era. The rapid development of Generative AI models will unlock more possibilities to enhance research, raise productivity, and facilitate innovation and creativity, he added.
AI's next phase will witness large AI models that help with tasks such as summarizing content, managing documents, and streamlining sales flows, extending to areas such as designing new molecules for drugs, writing texts, drawing pictures, composing music, deciphering codes and execute video clips, stressing that Microsoft is aware that AI will revolutionize our future and will change the course of our day-to-day life and work; therefore it must be used ethically and responsibly. Microsoft's policies and regulations in AI are designed in a way that considers the responsible and ethical use of AI technologies, Eng. Chady Haddad continued.
The Data and AI Regional Lead at Microsoft Middle East spoke about the company's interest in AI as the company has decades of experience in its research. In 2019, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI, the research lab behind chatbot and ChatGPT, and the Dall-E2 image generator, which converts language prompts into new images.
He also reviewed many of the programs adopted by the company in the AI field, as it adopted OpenAI's advanced AI capabilities within its products and services, such as the upgraded versions of the Edge browser and the Bing search engine, working as personal assistants using AI. In addition, the new Bing Image Creator tool allows users of the new AI-powered Bing search, Bing Chat, or the Edge browser to create creative images through descriptive texts.
About the reflection of AI programs on creativity in the field of literature, Qatari novelist and academic Dr Ahmed Abdul Malik said in a statement to QNA that development in all aspects of life is part of the historical inevitability of human development in general, and the entry of technology into the creative process was and still is present. For example, we find that the song was introduced to the technological development 10 years ago and became implemented in a few days and with great accuracy, no matter how much we disagree on the extent of the presence of sincere feeling in it.
He added that allowing critics to introduce technology, including AI, into creative works is no longer a matter governed by critics, in light of the reality of technology controlling people's destinies, so the electronic novel appeared several years ago, and critics accepted it, even if some of them opposed it.
He continued by saying that he is supporting any development in any field, and in the field of the novel; plane, spaceships, submarines and the time machine and other technology outputs appeared and were accepted by people and critics. He also believes that there is an impact of AI techniques on creative abilities, as it opens horizons for the creative writer, not the rigid writer, who introduces AI as a kind of keeping pace with time or to be a pioneer in this field.
He stressed that AI techniques do not kill creativity as long as they are used by creators, and are not intruders in the field of fiction.
Abdul Malik called arbitration committees in literary competitions (poetry, short story, and novel) to pay attention to such matters. He also called on the bodies concerned with education, especially higher education. For example, the production of research projects through AI technology prevents the diligent student from reaping what he has sown in years of hard work, however, there are programs that reveal the falsity of research.
Meanwhile, the Qatari engineer and plastic artist Ali Dasmal Al Kuwari said, in a similar statement to QNA, numerous AI programs have been created to advance the domains of printing and creative direction, for instance, allowing the practitioner of this kind of artistic direction to work with methods and instruments that support his work and creativity, like those who work in the field of specialized engineering programs for engineers in various disciplines such as architecture, interior design, etc., modern innovations help in all fields, including medicine and industry.
Al Kuwari further explained that traditional artistic creativity, such as drawing, painting, and sculpting, is situated in a different area with conventional production methods, and anyone who deviates from it is regarded as having violated the terms of the artwork. However, when an artist sells reproductions of his original artwork, whether drawings, prints, sculptures, or ceramics, the situation is different. Apart from that, we find that whoever relies on the means of AI leads to a loss of style and development and will be liable to imitate the work of others who follow the same approach of relying on the outputs of artificial intelligence. The international artist of British origin, David Hockney, wrote a book in which he discussed Ibn Al Haytham, the discoverer of the camera and the science of image reflection.
