Tag: AI

Skilled Artists Create Art; ‘Creatives,’ No

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June 25, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at the SMU Dallas Perkins School of Theology, for a commentary outlining a difference between the way Artificial Intelligence might generate “art” and how trained human artists follow a different process and produce different results. Published in Inside Sources under the heading Skilled Artists Create Art; ‘Creatives,’ No: https://tinyurl.com/3uva6tt6 ​

 

The word “artist” derives from the Latin “ars.” It refers to skill or craftsmanship. In popular understanding, an artist has creative ideas and the skill and craft to make these ideas manifest in works of art.

But in Silicon Valley culture and the tech industries in general, the word “artist” has been replaced by “a creative” or “creatives” in the plural.

A creative, in Silicon Valley parlance, is a person who makes Instagram videos, TikTok videos, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other social media content. It is “creatives” who manufacture content to fill the endless need for anything that will keep eyeballs on screens so that data can be collected and advertisements sold.

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Shall we lose our humanity for AI?

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June 1, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at the SMU Dallas Perkins School of Theology, for a commentary contemplating whether AI will compromise our ability to be human and appreciate life. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading Shall we lose our humanity for AI? : https://tinyurl.com/bd636ej2 ​

At a recent presentation on artificial intelligence, I was asked a rhetorical question: Will most of us will be intelligent enough to survive in the age of AI?

Even after all the AI advances, it is the wrong question.

The real question is whether we will be human enough to survive in an AI age.

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The more we think of AI as human, the more we think of ourselves as machines

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Oc. 16, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at Perkins School of Theology on the SMU Dallas campus, for a commentary cautioning against blurring the lines between artificial intelligence and humanity. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading: The more we think of AI as human, the more we think of ourselves as machines: https://tinyurl.com/mwnt4crs

The student in my doctoral seminar almost snorted when someone referred to Amazon’s Alexa as an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

“It’s nothing but a voice activated database query system. There’s no intelligence involved at all,” she scoffed.

She had a point and missed the point. Finding more user-friendly ways to access data has always been important and, over the years, technological upgrades have included a leap from specialized languages (secret codes that only the computers and their overlords understood) to natural language interfaces (“Alexa, turn on the lights.”) While impressive, these advances are not artificial intelligence.

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