Entry 5:
If you have not read Guy Gadney’s keynote speech from the MIX Conference 2019, you should. In fact, stop now and go read it here. What he has so concisely said, I find a struggle to put into words.
We are making enormous strides toward the future each and every year. With each step, we must make certain we are not damaging our creative outlets – the very things that mark our humanity on the world. Technology is, more or less, taking over. It is a fact we must come to terms with, however, they need to be our terms. Not the terms of big companies like Google.
With AI generating art and music and Google scanning in books without any payment or acknowledgement to authors, publishers, or copyright owners, creatives everywhere are facing being replaced. (I cannot even fathom how the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the tech company over those with creative rights!) This is not a good thing. As Gadney points out,
Firstly, it makes the cultural supposition that art is somehow a technical problem to be solved. It is not. This perspective belittles the creative industries and will have an impact on funding, perceived quality and indeed on the academic, practical and soulful journey that it takes to become an artist.
If art is somehow perceived as something a computer can conceive better than humans, and infinitely replicable, what hope do the true artists have?
And what about digital storytelling? If we post our stories through videos and pictures on the internet, they may go viral and help change the world. They also stand a likely chance of going viral as a meme or giph. At that point, the message has changed and the “story” is no longer what it was meant to be. What rights do we have? How do we keep our stories ours?
Gadney says our words need protecting. How do kids in a summer library film making program protect their words?
As storytellers, we are smart, creative and economically vulnerable. But we have stories and creativity that are valuable.
To recognise this is the first step towards being aware of the value we have to technology monoliths, and why, as we head towards the dawn of a new phase of technology, we need to stop them trying to recreate us inside their machines, and instead work jointly to safeguard the importance that human creativity has in all our future.
Computers taking over the world. People being replaced by AI. It all still seems very sci-fi to those of us you grew up without computers and cell phones. Now, however, it is very important that we take seriously our rights over our creations, our stories.
Perhaps it is time to use our digital storytelling to bring light to this issue. Let’s help others realize that some of those futuristic sci-fi movies are not so very off base. That we are talking about our future, our stories, and those of our children. What voice will they have if they never have the rights to their own stories?
コメント