Yesterday was the 48th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here'. I thought I'd celebrate it somehow.
I'm an internet creator and I love playing with NFT. I thought I'd look at how the AI tools could help me create content and how blockchain would help me with distribution.
Using ChatGPT , I created content for a story about an alien named Zarnak who learns about humanity through the most important records in history. ChatGPT created the story for me. The content quite alright. It won't get a literary Nobel Prize for it, but at the level of a story for a 10-year-old, OK.
In Playground AI (prompt: an alien extended one of my appendages to activate the playback vinyl record - nota bene it's an excerpt from a CHatGPT short story). I then created a new collection on Uncut "Intergalactic Guide: Best Albums of the Universe by Zarnak" and in it a token dedicated to a Pink Floyd album. People who made the token claim received an excerpt from the podcast (which I created at Wondercraft using my voice) as well as the whole story in Polish and English in PDF. Token holders also received invitations to dedicated groups on Discord and Telegram. Then, using Bonfire I created a token gated landing page where NFT token holders from Uncut (they have to transfer it to their MetaMask to access the content on the landingpage) can listen, read and watch a subtitled video version of Zarnak's entire story.
Conclusions:
The tools are simple, the pathways are simple too. The only thing that worries me is that in all the tool hustle, the content itself has been lost. And the content is banal, emotional, very simple and poor. I have noticed with myself that the 'creativity' of AI makes me lazy. I have experienced "creative laziness" - this means that the content was so good that I didn't want to improve it. To add something personal to it. AI realised my concept of "an alien gets to know humanity through the most important records in history and tells us about ourselves based on them" and did so to a satisfactory level. Everything is at a satisfactory level. However, it is not MY VOICE - it is not MY STYLE, it is NOT ME!
For AI creation I use the phrase (nota bene generated by ChatGPT - synthcraft) - because AI does not create. AI is a machine comparing billions of data and assembling a response from them. I enjoyed the whole game immensely, but will Zarnak's stories change anyone's life, or does AI convey what is most meaningful? He uses big words: empathy, dehumanisation, sensitivity, understanding, but this is not the result of experiencing a truly sentient and compassionate being. It's a spit out of technological mouths response to my promprt with no heart behind it that understands. I feel disillusioned and 'creatively lazy'.
My fear is that human culture is at a huge impasse, it's going to get worse, more generative content, more 'reasonably OK content' that is already boring and predictable in the age of algorithms. AI will only exacerbate this, as it is incapable of rendering that divine genius that only man has, created in the image and likeness of the greatest ARTIST!
I am not technophobic, on the contrary, I find the use of AI and blockchain-based tools clever today. It's good to know and use them. However, good to always add something from yourself. That's why I'm looking at the development of AI tools with the hope that, for real creatives who are willing to step out of the zone of "creative laziness" focused on coming up with only cool concepts to be developed by AI, I believe that just by using the tools, we will have more time to refine the content and AI and blockchain will take care of promotion and distribution.
Links:
Zarnaks collection: https://zarnak.uncut.network/
Token gated landing page: https://panwinyl.xyz/zarnakpodcasts - gate will be open till 15/09, than will be close, go and check of the results!