AI Is Killing Creativity – But You Can Help To Stop It

AI has gone very rapidly in my mind from a mild irritation to the source of such fury that I can’t actually keep my mouth closed any more. I’ve made a video in the past designed to help people identify AI crochet images and explained why they aren’t a good thing. I think I did a good job of staying calm. But in hindsight, too calm.

But that time has gone now, because I’m really annoyed. And you need to hear this. Because thousands of good people are making this problem worse every single day. And it needs to stop.

Let’s Start With Facebook

My facebook feed is destroyed these days. I rarely get a glimpse of actual crochet, it’s all AI nonsense. Some of it is implausible, but some has got really good. So good in fact that to the average casual viewer, it seems convincing.

Take this example:

This smurf that popped up in my feed.

This is AI, or at least enhanced by AI. I can tell because the smurf is distinct from the hand, it’s shading is off, the feet look textured but you can’t define individual stitches. And i’m not alone in spotting this. A few other people did too:

But here’s the problem. This post has LOADS of comments and shares, but as far as I could see only these two were negative. And I think I can tell you why.

Comment Filters

I run a few big facebook pages, and they are often inundated with spammy comments. Super dodgy stuff with men trying to prey on women. To get rid of these comments we have a list of blocked words that we can select through facebook’s support section. We auto block any comment with ‘contact me’ ‘DM me’ or other things people don’t want to hear from strangers online.

I think these pages are blocking the terms ‘fake’ ‘scam’ and ‘AI’ So only a very few negative comments that don’t use these terms get through the net, leaving the remainder full of lovely supportive things from people who just haven’t noticed the flaws as they casually scan past the image.

I see literally dozens of examples of this every day, and that is not an exaggeration.

So Why So Much AI?

When so many real, awesome designs are being shared daily too, why are we seeing so much fakery?

Well, it’s because almost impossibly amazing designs get engaged with more, because if you believe them, they are awesomely sharable! And each share makes facebook show the image to more people. It’s a self fulfilling system for content that supports posts that get a lot of action, but unfortunately this also means we’re now flooded with impossible things no real creator has produced.

And I’d love to hear how other people feel about this, but personally, it’s left my facebook page basically dead.

My real toys can’t compete with these fake ones, no matter how cute or cool I think they are. They aren’t going to be shared at the same rate as magic sparkle steroid amigurumi, so no one is going to see them. And facebook pages of real creators are dying.

And that’s a problem, because AI has also overrun websites, which means I’m getting less traffic from facebook and google, so all the people who were seeing my patterns a year ago, aren’t. They are off being tricked by impossible goals, which will only inevitably make them feel bad about their confused creations, because the patterns don’t add up to the images. (At least not for now).

Why Is That A Problem?

I gave most of my crochet patterns away for free, and still do, although a few have paid PDFs, but most of the revenue I made from the time I spent designing them was made through website advertising.

It wasn’t a lot of money, but it made the time I spent away from my other jobs worth it financially. I can no longer justify crocheting during working hours, I have to do it during my time off. And I work more than full time hours and have a young family, bunch of pets and other responsibilities. So, i’ve sort of stopped crocheting at all. And this isn’t a woe-is-me story, it’s one that’s being played out around the world for creative people.

You won’t see a lot of new patterns coming up, because I cannot justify giving my time to designing them. And neither can a lot of other people, from cartoonists to sculptors.

What Can We Do?

I can’t do much by myself, but I genuinely believe that together we can stop this train of doom from reaching the station. We can derail the juggernaut, we can take the beast down. We just need to stop rewarding people who are using AI to make these images by being critical when we view pictures in a way humanity has never needed to be before. If we aren’t 100% sure, we don’t share, we don’t like, and we don’t follow the page. We can only stop this monster if we cut off its food source, which is our attention.

If we don’t, I don’t know where this is going but it’s not a destination I think I want to arrive at. Where machines take the fun jobs and we’re stuck with the dull ones? That’s not a world any of us want. Especially not when we designed, sketched, photographed and created every iota of the images it’s made. Don’t forget that AI is just a culmination of billions of bits of data sucked up from the internet. It uses these bits of art information to create something that looks new, but without actual artists coming before it, this couldn’t have existed. And I don’t know about you, but I never gave my permission for that.