Machine intelligence meets human creativity in the neighbourhood that has survived everything except its own success
By Harper-Thames | The last journalist left in EC2 who pays market rent.
Sources: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
A Dispatch From the Intersection
Here in Shoreditch, where creativity and commerce have been doing an increasingly unequal tango for twenty years, the AI chaos has arrived and it feels, frankly, like a Tuesday. We have been disrupted before. We have been platformised, tokenised, and turned into a tourism destination. AI is simply the next chapter in an ongoing story about what happens when an idea becomes a postcode and a postcode becomes a brand.
The creatives are worried. Of course they are worried. They were also worried about Instagram killing photography and YouTube killing music and streaming killing cinema, and all of those things both died and didn’t die simultaneously, in the quantum way that things do now where everything is fine and also everything is terrible.
What AI Actually Does to a Creative Neighbourhood
It provides tools that the quick-moving and unsentimentally practical will use to do more. It provides existential anxiety to everyone else. Both outcomes are happening simultaneously and both are real. A graphic designer on Rivington Street told me she uses AI for initial concepts and feels “slightly sick about it but the clients love it.” This is the honest version of the conversation that most people are not having publicly.
Meanwhile OpenAI is literally here, in a building, with people in it, making decisions about the things that will make decisions for us. They are our neighbours now. In Shoreditch, we have a tradition of making our neighbours feel welcome. We also have a tradition of making art about them when they behave badly. Both traditions are ready. The question is which one gets deployed first.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ai-chaos-explained/
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