By: Shilpa Gopal
With the Oscars just under a month away, one nominated film has landed itself in hot water. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” has received ten nominations, including one commending actor Adrien Brody for Best Actor. The film fell into controversy when its editor revealed that they had used Respeecher, a voice-editing artificial intelligence platform, to manipulate Brody’s voice in key scenes.
Now, many are questioning whether the film deserved its nominations, arguing that utilizing artificial intelligence discourages actors from learning new dialects and widening their range to play a character.
It’s not just actors who are losing their touch. Students, artists, and actors alike have been given a weapon disguised as a tool. When we pick up that tool to look for recipes, create essay topics, or even search for Christmas gifts, we take a knife to our creativity.
More and more, students are less able to retain information or complete basic problems. Reliance on tools like OpenAI has dealt a critical blow to the development of analytic thinking and retention skills of an entire generation. The basic thinking pathways developed in education have become entirely dependent on a source that spits out information with little to no effort.
So what does this mean for human creativity?
As we become increasingly desperate for more and more generative AI, we begin to reward efficiency in outcome over the skills of the human creative process. When actors like Timothée Chalamet deliver realistic, appraised performances like his newest role as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”, what message does it send for films like “The Brutalist” to use voice-editing AI? More importantly, what message will it send for Brody to win?
On a smaller scale, our reliance on artificial intelligence to provide instant answers will soon poison the well of knowledge provided by humans for humans.
When everyone is simply using the quickest banana bread recipe from ChatGPT, there will be no demand for people to share their personal recipes or learn how to make it themselves. If you can use generative AI to come up with a new logo, there will be no incentive to hire designers to create a unique graphic. Slowly, the creatives that hold up individual ideas and social novelty will fade away.
I don’t mean to say that artificial intelligence is entirely bad. I think there are certain uses in which it could really assist human intelligence. But when AI is used to replicate real human creations and take the place of a learned skill, we chip away yet another piece of what makes us human beings.
Keep a journal, write down recipes, read real articles, and continue to find new ways to be creative! Incoming generations will have to relearn the ways we keep the innate human ability to create alive.