Many ups, downs to using AI in various creative mediums

Many articles and online forums have gone on and on about AI and how good/bad it is, but how good or bad is it really? What are its ups and downs? What about different uses of AI?

AI Text Generation

AI text generating is a common tool for writers, whether they use it as a basis or just submit what the AI generated is the distinction and the issue. When generating the text for the examples a person gave, the AI will sometimes put in fake facts or untrue information, making it easy to spot from something genuine. 

Journalism teacher Brian Winkel said, “I think Chatbox GPT has really strong potential to help you refine your work. Some examples are running Associated Press Style checks, proofreading and checking your article, or taking the standards in a class and then asking the AI to check an article for these things. It becomes like a teacher, in a sense, and that I think that is a really empowering way to use it. For me, the biggest troubles come to two forks in the road: one is when you have students who use ChatboxGPT to write their stories as the first step instead of as a tool for refining their previous efforts. The second troublesome road for is that it lies; it makes up fake support to substantiate answering whatever prompt a user requests, and if a writer doesn’t check up on those citations, it can be very embarrassing for the writer. Many big magazines and resources are trying to use Chatbox as a shortcut for writing, and I really think that’s troublesome.”

AI Art 

Ai art is another common tool, this time for a wider range of people, as it can be used for a lot of things. AI art can be used to generate scenery, characters, etc. A good possible use for AI art is storyboarding for a series, giving an AI prompts so it can generate a rough idea for what the scene would look like. A downside for AI art is that the images it produces are very, very rough at times, things not making logical sense, messing up things like facial expressions/features, or its struggle to create convincing human hands. Sometimes the result of this AI is what can only be described as Hapsburg abominations. 

AI Animation

AI animation is a very specific and relatively unknown tool. Its use is to increase the frame rate of animations. Most people use it to take animations that were made in lower frames and bump them up to 60 frames per seconds (fps). The unfortunate side of this is that the animation usually ends up as a janky mess because the animation wasn’t made for 60 fps. In animation, the standard is 24 fps, so there are 24 individual uniquely drawn frames, but it takes more work to always do 24 different frames in a second, so people started animating with 12 frames, which is called animating on twos, and eight frames, which is called animating on threes. For multiple reasons, either to lighten work or to accentuate an action, people use these different animation frame rates together to make things look unique from one another. Back to AI animation, most people don’t work in 60 fps because it’s just not worth it, so when one puts a 24 fps animation into 60, it looks janky, melts the frames in-between, and worst of all, removes the imperfection that animation naturally has. With each animation, each drawing will naturally be different from the last, but with AI, it’s still a machine, a machine that will keep everything on model all the time, removing the natural beauty that animation has.

AI Voice Acting

One fairly new program that is used involves copying voices of actors with AI. Companies use programs to copy people’s voices who they’ve hired in the past, and then they use those voices without the actor’s persimmon if a contract exists, creating a bit of a loophole where the voice can be used over and over without paying the actor. 

Junior Carter Johnson is a voice actor and artist. “I don’t think it’s good for the companies or the actors. Actors should be appraised for their work, so I don’t think it’s OK unless the actor gives express persimmon, while some people think AI voice acting should not be used at all.”