AI AI, SIR!

SANGEETA WADDHWANI ON THE FEAR, FASCINATION AND THE IMPOSTER SYNDROME WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It is finally happening.

 

We are destroying humanity’s natural propensity to find joy in hard work. We have harnessed our soul’s hunger for organically expressed creativity, by letting technology take over the reins in every sphere – image creation, video creation, PPT creation, social media engagement tools, social media post generation tools, song creation and film trailor creation.

 

At first, the insta-creativity strikes us as miraculous. All the children of Goddess Saraswati and Goddess Mahalaxmi get their articles, marketing PPTs, essays, deeply moving songs, imagery and social media posts on auto-pilot. With astounding results sometimes, or with results that need some tweeks. Chalta hai. In India, we say, ‘This is so cool – 80,000 songs a day from SUNO… let’s do this…as long as the tool is free!’

 

What could be the collateral damage?

According to UNESCO, the creative economy, which employs 48 million people and currently contributes 3.1% to global GDP, is expected to account for 10% of the global GDP by 2030. What are we doing to the creative economy, especially in populous nations like India?

 

Let’s see. For the hundred plus years of our glorious Indian cinema, there were no such tools. Javed Akhtar wrote his Sholay chakki peesing dialogue on the bonnet of a car just before entering the airport to get his flight out of Ramgarh to Mumbai. Today, more than three generations later, most of India can recite that dialogue! Why did it work so well??

It was organic. Spun from our desh ki dharti.

 

Fast forward to 2024. Let’s imagine a Javedsaab rushing to catch his flight to Mumbai, telling the producer, ‘Pay me my next one crore if you want to extend the script – thoda last minute hai.”

 

A Gen Z or Y film-maker may not have that kind of a budget. So what do they do? Shop the AI tool bazaar and hit GENERATE to get their dialogue for the sozzled Veeru! A film-maker’s entire marketing campaign and trailor – which at a time would cost him or her a chunk of the film’s budget – can now turn to the new AI ‘talent’ pool – Creatify, InVideo, VideoGen or Ideogram – to get his visual and audio storytelling ideas. Imagine him feeding the prompt – Drunk Lover Threatens Suicide To Get His Sweetheart to commit and get her mother’s objections out of the way… in front of the whole village of Ramgarh.’

 

We would probably get a polished, impeccable suicide threat speech in globalese with no reference to Mataji getting a lifetime jail sentence where she will be ‘chakki peesing, and peesing and peesing!”

 

So why are we doing this to ourselves? Making a technology that annihilates the NEED to create, to employ our capacity to be suprahuman, to imagine, to dream?  Is it not written in our sacred scriptures that creativity is inherently Divine, and that all the 64 arts have the power to empower, heal, remove depression, renew and re-energise us? That great works of art build personal and collective legacies?  After all, 81.1 percent of case studies have shown that creative therapy removes stress and improves the energy frequency we emit.

 

As a mediaperson, I have known how ‘organic’ storytelling impacted me. When I worked for STAR TV’s the Amul India Show, I recall myself and two beefy camera men going to visit the city’s dance bars.  In the four-dimensional world, each HD camera was eight kilos and there were no cell phone cameras to rely on.

 

 Anyways, we were physically going to visit bars where dancers were shimmying to Bollywood music. We captured the way they lit aggarbatis around the dancefloor, and bowed low, their foreheads touching the nearby God statues, showing gratitude for the platform that paid their children’s school fees and paid the bills.

 

As a window on India, we were trying to show the OTHER SIDE to the argument that these bars were citadels of sin. Who was really sinning here – the women working for their children, or a government that refused to ‘zoom’ into their sad realities?

 

Today, social media users can generate a video showing bar dancers (without ever meeting them) and simply spew a caption asking, ‘WHO WILL PAY THEIR BILLS?’  It touches very little in the spirit of the ‘content creator’ or viewer – no nuances here!

 

We can create clouds for a scene (like we saw in the Oscar-nominated Lagaan) without waiting for Nature. In fact, that is exactly what the Amir Khan production team did, when they needed those pregnant monsoon clouds, bulging, grey, menacing and yet assuring the farmers that abundance will come to their parched lives and lands, once the clouds broke into a ghannana ghannana thunder and diamond pellets of rain.

 

Recently, the renowned fashion/lifestyle celebrity photographer, Vikram Bawa, shared how AI tools had multiplied the possibilities of image creation, without any sweat, blood, any contact with reality.

 

There was a time “we would rise at the crack of dawn for a shot with the ‘right light’ by the Yamuna flowing by the iconic and eternally awe-inspiring Taj Mahal in Agra. We had to ‘make friendships’ with the authorities to shoot around the back of the monument, sip chai with them, get to know about their lives and their work, over the few days of the fashion shoot. Slowly, they would see their location, from a fashion photographer’s point of view. ‘Sir, ye light hamme chahiye. Ye subha ka light mein meri model sabse khubsurat lagegi.”

 

Today, he can create the model, prompt for the light, location, clothes, hair, make-up, storyboard – all on AI. The only expense? The price for the tool subscription!

 

For every advancement in technology, job markets have broken down, only to rebuild accommodating the disruption. But here in the Kaliyuga, we are actually moving to a mediated reality where you will not need teamwork, you can avoid human interactions and idea-swaps and brainstorms altogether, putting that laptop where everybody else used to be. Goodbye to the chai, chats and chaat-fests, goodbye to the naughty jokes about Donald or DOLAND Trump (as our PM called him at the Namaste Trump event in 2020, in Delhi.)

Gone are the chances to grow together, try out new ideas – visceral, visual, musical – and gone is the ethos of failing together, making immaculate memories of working around the clock, screaming with joy at victories.

 

Years ago, when writing a piece on the Bahai’ faith, after visiting the Lotus Temple in Delhi, I remember the leader, Baha’ullah, predicting that as humanity evolves, borders between nations will cease to matter, preachers will vanish because knowledge will be accessible to all, and we will move towards a collective, global consciousness. “Every one will have the education and intelligence to access the scriptures themselves,” was the spirit of his prediction.

Will there be a day soon, when a robot will dictate my values and choices, and I will be left programmed to say, “AI AI Sir?”

 

I would add to that, Artificial Intelligence is actually a part of that process, as it shocks me how like a genie, it takes your prompt and can spin whatever you want with such a smooth alignment to your cultural codes, moods and flavours! This is true whether your prompt is Russian, Hindi, British, American…

 

So in Humanity V3, the Creator in each one of us is going to become tech-enabled, then tech-addicted and tech-dependent. Schools may need two kinds of therapists – one a ‘de-addiction’to the digital tools ‘expert, and another, ‘coping with the pace of innovation’ therapist.

 

We ask, will there ever be a 100 percent OG creation, in the mediated reality? Will AI tools really replace our ‘tais’ and ‘ais’ (aunts and mother in Marathi)? Old people have seen the quickest devaluation in the Age of Information… dead before they die. For who really wants their offerings of life lessons, epics, songs…paintings?

 

After all, even First-Gen tech tools like WhatsApp, Messenger services, Facebook, Twitter, Bumble, Tinder – annihilated the idea of us as a monogamous race. We are now moulded by this easy access to multiple relationships, multiple business streams, multiple wardrobe choices – all with a few clicks of a button.

 

What all this excess has spawned, paradoxically, is an Extreme Loneliness. Every family is a multi-walled fortress where each individual lives in his or her parallel universe, online. We over-document what is of least importance, and often miss the finer stories that need to be documented – like my experience with Mumbai’s bar dancers.

 

Osho famously predicted a time where technology will take over all money-making endeavours, leaving humanity confronting its empty existence, filled with an undefinable angst. We can take it two ways – self-destruct from the loneliness of empty connectivity and delegated work and creativity, or go the other way – dive deep into organic creation and creativity, spiritual retreats, explore higher ideals, meditate more, spread more peace and wisdom, preserve our planet.  

 

The more I see AI take away my need to create, the more I shudder.

Who will be the master, who the servant? Can AI tools ever replace the muscle memory of hard work that our artisans carry in their DNA going back 5,000 plus years?

“Ai, Ai, Sir, Ma’am…”

 

 

SANGEETA WADDHWANI
CREATIVE DIRECTOR

SAN CREATIVES 

THE CONTENT SHOP

Website: www.sangeetawaddhwani.com

Blog: http://editorspicks.blog (LIFE OF A MAGAZINE EDITOR)

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