SXSW London: Risk of AI removing choice
The modern era, where AI speeds up day-to-day chores, is undermining creativity and the ability to make choices
Among the interesting talking points discussed during the South by Southwest (SXSW) London festival in Shoreditch was the importance of maintaining human creativity and ingenuity in the era of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI models are being improved every day, and its risk to the creative industries was one of the topics explored at SXSW.
The implications of AI developments and how people need to adapt in an era when AI can surpass human thinking has implications across society and will touch every industry.
Given AI is being broadly adopted across society, among the considerations is how to prepare young people so they can work alongside AI tools rather than compete. Since a tool like ChatGPT can answer exam questions, in a panel discussion, James Kirkham, founder and CEO at Iconic, acknowledged the challenge young people are facing doing their GCSEs. “How are we going to show the importance of human creativity?” he asked.
The implications of his comments are that kids would gain a more useful life skill by learning how to ask the AI the right questions, rather than learning facts they are then tested on in an exam.
Kirkham went further, discussing the need to teach children about taste. As generative AI becomes adept at writing and creating art and video content, he believes it is important that children understand why something is perceived as more tasteful compared with something else.
This may seem obvious, but the panel discussion explored how the choices people make are being algorithmically manipulated.
Risk of AI to humanity
During the panel discussion, Erika Wykes-Sneyd, general manager and vice-president at Adidas Studio, spoke about how technology providers were working to make AI-based technologies more integrated into society. “I think the technology companies are making us comfortable,” she said. “AI needs to be warm and fuzzy to drive adoption.”
The development work to improve these AI systems happens behind the scenes as people use the products. For Wykes-Sneyd, the challenge for society is how it can demonstrate human creativity as the AI systems get better and better at providing content.
In the age of exponential digital acceleration, she said: “What we’re realising is that what makes us messy and what makes us human is what we need to get closer to.”
Kirkham warned: “To stand out, we need to be at our creative best.” However, he pointed out that for the past few years, people have been completely enslaved by what he described as “their algorithmic lives in a quest for convenience”.
For instance, the idea of a recommendation engine or an AI feeding relevant content has been adopted by society to help people save time. But this has led to a herd mentality, where people stop thinking about the choices they are making and everyone is guided to choose similar things. “This leads to a kind of vanilla vagueness,” said Kirkham.
People may say they would like to see new music, but as he points out, they actually want a singer-songwriter that is a little bit like Ed Sheeran. These decisions are programatically baked into AI tools, which, as a consequence, limits the content people are presented with, such as on social media feeds.
Beyond algorithms innocuously removing people’s ability to choose, they are set to automate much of existing work, according to Wykes-Sneyd. She noted that 70% of the work that is done inside companies is rather like an internal slide deck presentation, where much of the actual work can be replaced by an AI. “The way we work will have to radically change,” said Wykes-Sneyd.
Her view on how companies will succeed is by organising around small teams that can not only work creatively and collaborate, but are also grounded in how their work contributes to the business’s profit and loss accounts.
