Thanks to Sunni Chapman who so beautifully and brilliantly put together her own perspectives, here. She inspired me to be vulnerable and brave about sharing my feelings on the use of AI tools in my creativity practices.
“Someone still has to put the time into directing the machine to the desired results. Someone still has to have the eye, the creativity, the ideas, and the ability to curate those themes into a cohesive whole.” — Sunni Chapman, How I Feel About AI
When you use AI ethically, it can be one of the most fun and rewarding ways to indulge in your creativity. It requires the prompt engineer to be incredibly discerning and detail-orienting in crafting prompts to bring a vision to life. I would go so far as to say that it forces creators to hone their craft of sensory details. To create something unique, you have to be able to describe your ideal outcome. And we all see creation very differently. So inherently, when we use our sense of details and vision, we are creating something wholly original. Yes, even if that was trained on thousands of other creators’ work. And you know what? All those artists have been influenced and reiterated other creators’ work. Everything has been done, loves. Everything. It is the cycle of life, after all.
But not everyone sees AI that way. And that’s okay. You do you.
I resisted at first, too, as we all do when change scares us. But… here’s a #truthbomb, it’s not going away. I think the more educated you can become on the advances happening in your field (and AI affects every field) the likelier chance you have of adapting to it.
And I believe the greatest asset of any creative person is adaptability.
So rather than ignore, boycott, or fear AI, I’m choosing to learn how to adapt to it as I have many of my other “tools” (Scrivener, Autocrit, etc).
And I’m going to do that as ethically as I can by being a responsible prompt engineer.
For a great overview of what “Prompt Engineering” is and why it can be done ethically, check out this article. For a great breakdown of Ethics and AI, check out the article, “Ethics and AI: Ethical Side of Prompt Engineering”