I begin this opinion piece with a warning to the reader of 'Next in Beauty': you are not going to like it. Why? Because it breaks a paradigm that has been maintained since the industrial revolution and that has been engraved in all our heads with the science fiction of the last century. What paradigm is that? The search for and construction of a utopia in which machines and robots would carry out all the most repetitive and tedious tasks, while human beings would dedicate themselves to creation, contemplation or the enjoyment of their free time devoted to different hobbies.
And then came the emergence of artificial intelligence and dismantled this utopia (at least in the short term) to create a new dystopia. The RAE defines dystopia as 'Fictional representation of a future society with negative characteristics causing human alienation'. Is it that bad? Maybe yes or maybe no, let's analyse it a bit.
Humans have turned in the last two years to using and implementing artificial intelligence tools that write text for us, generating everything from books to detailed technical documents on anything with no more effort than a few brief prompts. AI has become the world's greatest writer in just a few months. Then we have the tools to produce images, to the point of being able to create art when we mix this technology with other tools such as 3D printing or robots capable of painting a picture. AI is probably already the world's biggest image-maker. Not to mention music, with AI tools capable of emulating the style (and even the voice) of any composer or musician. I haven't followed this area that closely, but I suspect it is already being exploited by savvy entrepreneurs who will see this huge opportunity. And video creation? More of the same, there are already tools (whose use is growing exponentially every day) that generate videos just by providing a text of what we want (text that, in turn, can be created by tools such as ChatGPT).
Did I leave anything out? I've left out a lot, probably due to ignorance. Yesterday I was told about a streamer who had opened a Twitch channel where everything (characters, dialogues, situations) was created in a different automated way by AIs. Also the creation of content, including avatars that look like real people who have to tell us a story.
But who still works on the construction site every day? Who still fills in excel sheets? It is obvious that many manual tasks have improved with the creation of these tools and other less sophisticated ones, but the real truth is that the utopia was the human being dedicated to the creative and the machines to the repetitive and boring. Today, the unforeseen twist has led us to the fact that, for the moment, machines are going much further, not only doing the repetitive but also the creative, and the human being has been momentarily cornered in many creative activities.
We will never be able to compete in productivity with a machine or an AI, it should not be our task. But we must reclaim humanity's place in the creative sphere, making the most of these new technologies that are here to stay, but defending that spark of genius that sets us apart and marks our humanity.