Alex's Metaphor of the Elongated Coin

On Tuesday night I held my first live session entitled "WHAT TO WORRY ABOUT: AI and the Creative Industries." It was an extremely helpful proof of concept for me, and helped me see myself giving talks like it in the future. Thanks so much to those of you who were able to attend. Extra special thanks to my fiancé Mariah who helped me set up the lighting and camera to look my absolute best.

For those of you who were able to come, you've already heard me talk about this. But I wanted to expand on my "elongated coin" metaphor in writing.

The basic premise is as follows:

At Disneyworld, you'll find these machines that create souvenir coins for guests. You take a penny, put it into a hand cranked machine, pay a little for the service, and then turn the crank until out pops an elongated coin with some sort of image on it.

I found them thrilling as a child.

But there are two aspects of this process that I think are relevant and informative ways to think about AI generated art.

The Resource

In order to make an elongated coin, you must take something with inherent value (1 cent) and compress and stretch and stamp it into something that literally erases what was once inherently valuable about that thing.

In order to make AI generated text, video, images, etc, the major players in the AI industry have taken something with inherent value (the collective of all human generated creative work) and stretched it into a complex matrix of semantic weights out of which we can generate a thoughtless facsimile of that once valuable thing. The same way that Disney will delight its parkgoers with the cheap and immediate thrill of destroying ones coin to get Mickey Mouse on it, the major AI companies have pilfered the enormous corpus of human created work in order to output something cheap, thoughtless, and generic.

The end result

Great, so you've smashed your penny, now what? While there are certainly people who collect elongated coins, and I mean absolutely zero disrespect to those people, the newly smushed coin has lost its value. It can no longer be used to purchase things, and now simply serves as memorabilia of the time you went to Disney and hand cranked your penny.

And I am not saying that that is worthless! But what I am saying is that the coin only has value to you. People may find it interesting as they consider the mechanical process by which your penny became an image of Mickey Mouse, but it's unlikely they will buy the coin off of you. I have a hunch that this is the same for AI generated "art."

As it stands today, anybody could go into DALL-E or Midjourney and generate some imagery. But I'd argue that while what you make may be compelling, it is not long term viable as a replacement for human created work.

So what?

At the end of the day, I may be screaming into the void about this. AI generated work is already in use across industries, and creative industries to boot. It already has found its way into mass media, as in the case of Marvel's Secret Invasion.

But I think that the large media companies are playing a dangerous game incorporating AI generated work where once human creation stood. Artists are the resource, not the art, and these companies would be better served to recognize that before they start passing off AI generated work as just as valuable as the real deal.