Creation is an Act of Sheer Will – Jurassic Park & A Future with AI
What makes Jurassic Park so special is that I have enjoyed it on so many different levels as I've grown from a small boy to a man. It's only watching it as an adult that I grasped the morality at the heart of the story.
Jurassic Park is my favourite film of all time and recently I’ve gone back and re-watched the original trilogy and re-read the original Michael Crichton novels. As you can see from the photos from this blog, I also recently visited the Jurassic World Exhibition in Manchester. At the heart of the original story is the ethics of utilising new technology, an overreliance on automation to the neglect of human input and the subsequent unintended consequences. Something that is all too relevant now with the rise of AI. Almost everyday there is a new update, warning or scandal involving this rapidly evolving technology, and many are worried about the implications, especially as a considerable number of roles reserved for humans in the past look set to become redundant. If they haven’t already. In the future a machine may replace an accountant or a secretary. But what has gotten people more animated than anything else (if you pardon the pun) is the increasing impact on the creative industries.
In Jurassic Park amber is the source of dinosaur DNA. A parallel could be drawn between the scientists harvesting what nature created to make dinosaurs and AI harvesting what humans have created to generate 'art'.
There are two quotes from the 1993 film that stand out to me and cut to the heart of this subject matter. The first from John Hammond:
‘Creation is an act of sheer will’
Creation is a force that comes from inside you, an expression of your inner thoughts and desires and it’s a process that cannot be cheated. Taking an idea from inception to completion is a journey often with many stumbling blocks and lessens learned. At the end not only do you have the satisfaction of what you’ve created, but the experience gained along the way. It requires effort, practice, patience and above all determination to carry out. Through all of this the process is more important for your soul than the final output. Most people have some form of creative output whether that is drawing, painting, knitting or, in my case, photography. More often than not however people don’t get to live out their careers through these passions, it is something they do on the side, using what little spare time they have without the need for the motivation of money.
Visiting the Jurassic World Exhibition I took along my Leica iii with a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 to create dark and grainy images that gave a very old feeling. Almost as though they were images found from Isla Nublar in 1993.
The second, much longer, quote in Jurassic Park is from Ian Malcolm, who in the film is trying to challenge Hammond on his hubris in bringing long extinct animals back to life as though it was nothing:
‘It didn’t require any discipline to obtain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could. And before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you’re selling it…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.’ – Ian Malcolm
All too often people are using AI to cut corners, whether it is to write essays or to pretend they drew something when they didn’t. They are then personally profiting off something they didn’t do while passing it off as their own and cheating others in the process. It’s becoming increasingly common to see ‘artists’ selling work as authentic human creation, only for it to be discovered later it was created using AI. To make matters worse AI has also obtained all its knowledge through harvesting what humans have already created without compensation or even recognition. Inevitably this puts people out of work whilst stifling creativity and originality. As AI can only copy what has already been made, our timelines are increasingly flooded with the same generic content. It’s a big problem for writing as well. If you search for the answer to a question online it’s staggering how many AI generated articles appear on generic looking websites all with the same format.
Like in the film the first dinosaur I encountered was a Brachiosaurus. Originally many of the dinosaur shots were going to be done with traditional stop animation however advancements in technology meant this was redundant and CGI was used instead. Thankfully a way was found to utilise these traditional skills to augment what could be done with computers and produce a better result. Another important lesson to learn in the rise of AI.
However much like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, AI generated content comes with lots of unexpected flaws. At a quick glance everything looks fine but scratch the surface even a little and the problems quickly become apparent. Elements of a drawing are not properly connected, details are little more than nonsensical patterns and these written articles are full of the same filler with little to no real information, designed to have as many generic key words as possible to cheat the algorithm and bump up the page’s SEO.
Light was limited inside but I used it to my advantage. If you were witnessing dinosaurs in real life you probably wouldn't get a clear view either. The grain also helps hide any imperfections in the animatronics.
There are however good uses for AI, especially in areas like healthcare such as identifying areas of cancer in a scan which is a binary ‘is it there or not?’. As ever technology should be used to help humans accomplish things rather than take over our lives and have the humans become servants to the machines. Increasing automation is nothing new, it’s been here ever since the Industrial Revolution, and it’s brought about vast improvements to our lives. After all, if we didn’t have mechanisation we wouldn’t have gone to school as children, we’d have have been toiling in the fields, planting crops by hand.
Inside the creation lab with images in the background pertaining to the creation of the Indominus Rex. Another act of scientific hubris gone wrong in 2015's Jurassic World.
However, automation and mechanisation should be reserved for mundane tasks that require a great deal of manual labour, repetition and little thought. I doubt my great grandfather as a blacksmith received much creative satisfaction from producing the same nails and horseshoes by hand day after day, year after year. Humans should be focused on the tasks that provide real innovation and value, with machines left to do the admin work that would otherwise soak up our precious time and attention.
This cast of a T Rex skull was foreshadowing for what was to come later.
But what does it say about you as a creative if you are now relying on machines to generate your ‘creativity’? Is what you are creating mundane and derivative? Do you no longer enjoy the process of creating? I can understand that to an extent as a professional where you have to do things other people want for money rather than what you want, but if AI can do you job, then what is stopping the people paying you to simply replace you with AI? Is there anything left that makes your work unique or special?
Even at ISO 3200 and shooting wide open at F3.5, slow shutter speeds of 1/20s or 1/30s were required which didn't always capture the moving dinosaurs without motion blur. However I think it works in this image, it adds a sense of panic which is very much present in the story. And also present in the lives of many artists today.
There’s also a worrying element of people using it as an excuse to be lazy and not learn the fundamentals of their craft, which more than anything is cheating themselves. You are sacrificing your own growth and development to accomplish something faster, but to what end? As I said before, in creation (and life) the important part is the journey not the destination and without that the end result will be a hollow and meaningless one. Yes, it will be faster to do it with technology, but it can’t replace that sense of self worth nor quell that feeling of inadequacy. There’s a reason why people often try to hide their usage of AI in the creative arts because to put it quite simply, its embarrassing. Sure, in the past people used references for their work or took inspiration from other sources, but this came after learning their craft, and with putting their own creative spin on it. Those who just blatantly copied were not granted the respect of their peers.
Sadly there was no baby dinosaur to meet on this occasion. Upon arriving I quickly realised that this entire exhibition was much more geared up to kids than even I had expected, but at least it did serve as inspiration for this blog.
For me what I find most discouraging about AI is the further erosion of human interaction, something which is already lacking in society and as it continues will make a crisis in loneliness even worse. As a millennial my generation was the first to interact with humans more through technology than in person, but children born today may well be the first generation to interact more with machines than humans. A terrifying and sobering thought.
What impressed me the most was the sense of scale you got from these moving animatronics. They really make you understand how big dinosaurs were in a way that looking at bones simply doesn't.
I’ve presented the problem, but what is the solution? Firstly, it is to understand the one thing an AI cannot produce – a story. It can pump out generic content all day long, but it can’t weave it together into something coherent and brilliant like the works of Crichton or Spielberg. We have to ask ourselves ‘What story does this tell? What makes it more than just another pretty picture?’ If you can answer those questions, then you’ll never be replaced by a machine. Perhaps in the future people will be able to generate generic images of their wedding, but only I or another photographer can truly capture that special moment, perhaps when the groom shed a tear as he saw his bride for the first time. That wasn’t something that was cooked up by an algorithm, it happened, it was real, a memory not to be forgotten. A story to be passed down to future generations.
The grand finale unsurprisingly involved a T-Rex. This was my favourite image on the roll as it perfectly summarised what I had wanted to achieve. This great predator appears as though it is looming out of the dark with you as prey limited by the capabilities of your vision.
Lastly, we simply have to keep doing the things we enjoy. I remember speaking to someone last year about using AI to generate content for their blog. If I was to do so it would certainly make my life easier, writing fifty-two new blogs a year is no easy feat, but where’s the fun in that? How long it takes me to write isn’t what’s important, what’s important is being able to share something authentic and real, much like what John Hammond wanted to do with Jurassic Park. The illusion of the flea circus was only ever a means to an end, nothing more, nothing less. Could an AI have written this blog? Absolutely not. After all, an AI doesn’t even have a favourite film.
The general set design also impressed me. Something certainly put together by human creativity and not by a machine.
I hope this week’s blog was an insightful one and one that left you more hopeful than despondent. It’s a scary time for many people but it’s important that we don’t just throw in the towel and remember that as humans we do have something unique to offer that mere code can’t. Even if that means we need to make some changes. AI isn’t going anywhere but I also believe it’s currently a bit of a fad borne from novelty and once ordinary people became more able to see through it, there will be a clamouring for human creativity in a way we didn’t see before. It will be something truly appreciated and not just taken for granted. Life, uh, finds a way.
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