- Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, addressed the topic of job loss due to AI.
- AI will eliminate some creative jobs, “but maybe they shouldn’t have existed in the first place,” she said.
- Writer Ed Zitron called Murati’s remarks a “declaration of war on creative work.”
Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, looked into AI-related job losses this month, suggesting that some workers – particularly creatives – replaced by AI had jobs that “n ‘shouldn’t have been there in the first place.’
In doing so, she not only outraged people at risk of losing their livelihoods due to technological advancements, but also appeared to reveal that she doesn’t even know what AI is for, artists and a tech writer say.
At an event at Dartmouth on June 8, Murati, speaking with University Director Jeffrey Blackburn, discussed the AI behind ChatGPT. and DALL-E, as well as security and ethical considerations as the technology advances.
When the conversation turned to how AI can disrupt the process for artists, Murati said she believes the technology will soon be used primarily as a collaborative tool to help more people. become creative.
“Maybe some creative jobs will disappear,” Murati said, “but maybe they shouldn’t have existed in the first place — you know, if the resulting content isn’t very high quality. »
Murati notably raised the subject of job loss due to AI herself.
The creative community was already skeptical of OpenAI after reports that the company may have removed YouTube videos to train its models without creators’ permission and deployed a convoluted opt-out process. OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, has also scared Hollywood with its bizarre but remarkably realistic AI-generated clips.
Scarlett Johannson was among the most high-profile figures to speak out against OpenAI, fighting back after the company released a voice for its ChatGPT bot that sounded remarkably like hers — which OpenAI said was a coincidence.
Murati’s comments only made things worse, say two photographers and a writer.
Ed Zitron, writer, podcast host and CEO of EZPR, a national technology and business PR agency, told Business Insider that Murati’s view results from the distance between management and people who actually build things.
“Until now, the people who have lost their jobs to AI have been contract workers who have helped fill the gaps in organizations – necessarily – that are now going to be filled with deeply mediocre garbage, commanded by people who don’t understand the businesses they’re in, to fill a need they don’t care about or value, a kind of slow poison that will weaken company margins,” Zitron said.
Zitron added that he was tired of people “who don’t build, write, draw, paint, sing or do anything creative, who make statements about what things should be.” creative arts or how they should be managed.
“These people treat creativity as a problem to be solved,” he continued.
When Business Insider contacted OpenAI representatives, they declined to comment, instead pointing to a June 22 article on X written by Murati expanding on his thoughts.
How Artists Are Really Approaching AI
Boris Eldagsen is a photographer and visual artist interested in AI. Last year, as part of an effort to demonstrate how impossible it is to tell the difference between a “real” work of art and an AI-generated work of art, he participated – and won – the Sony World Photography Awards from the World Photography Organization with an image created with the help of OpenAI. DALL-E2. He ultimately refused the reward.
While in the past he was “a solo instrument” working to create new works, Eldagsen told BI that he now collaborates with AI technology, seeing himself more as a conductor while the data band serve as a “gigantic, anonymous chorus,” doing their job to “bring this into some sort of harmony and give it meaning.”
That said, he still doesn’t agree with Murati.
“I think it’s a shame and I don’t feel any empathy here. For me, his comments are a mixture of naivety and arrogance,” Eldagsen told BI. “I think she hasn’t really thought about it, or she can’t put herself in the shoes of these people who are afraid of losing their jobs.”
Saying that jobs that could be eliminated by AI shouldn’t exist in the first place, Eldagsen said, “is just absurd,” and suggesting that poor quality is at the heart of why these jobs could be lost shows that Murati has no real idea of how and why people create or consume things.
“Most of the stuff we produce is not high quality. We have fast food, we have trash TV shows, we have bad products that you can use once and then you throw them away,” Eldagsen said. “All of these things shouldn’t be there in the first place, but all of these things are jobs that some people have to do. They pay the rent, they make a living — and why would you have to be so arrogant and say that it shouldn’t exist? It’s something I just don’t understand.”
Miles Astray, an artist, photographer and writer, told Business Insider that Murati’s comments seemed “condescending.”
Like Eldagsen, Astray made AI the focal point of one of his artworks this month: he knocked down Eldagsen’s waterfall and won 3rd place in an art competition on the AI with a real photo of a flamingo.
Astray said he does not accept the idea that creativity will be boosted by AI. Asking a computer to do creative work cheapens the process, he says, and ultimately produces an end result that is a regurgitated copy of the data the AI was trained on, not an example of a person’s creative expression. human.
“You have to sit down with your piece of paper and your brush and start painting – that’s how you hone your skills,” Astray said. “I think this will really boost businesses, who will use it as a tool to increase productivity and cut corners.”
Ultimately, Astray said he sees the tension between technology and creativity less about facilitating the creative process and more about companies leveraging technology to outsource jobs to the point where they no longer need to employ a creative workforce.
“I think we need to have an honest public debate about the benefits, but also the pitfalls and dangers of AI technology,” Astray said. “But that’s not what she was doing.”
“Mediocrity is all they want”
“AI tools could lower the barriers and allow anyone with an idea to create,” Murati wrote in his June 22 X article. “At the same time, we need to be honest and acknowledge that AI will automate some tasks. Just as spreadsheets changed things for accountants and bookkeepers, AI tools can do things like write online ads or create generic images and templates.
She added that a key part of the debate over AI-related job losses, particularly among creative professions, is “recognizing the difference between temporary creative tasks and those that add lasting meaning and value to the society”.
“With AI tools supporting more repetitive or mechanistic aspects of the creative process, like generating SEO metadata, we can free up human creators to focus on higher-order thinking and creative choices level,” Murati wrote. “This allows artists to maintain control of their vision and focus their energy on the most important parts of their work.”
Technology do having the ability to free up time, make some repetitive work tasks more efficient and give artists more space to think about the things that actually make them creative, Astray acknowledged, but he said not everyone He didn’t have the will to be creative – and that was unlikely. AI would magically change this fact.
Eldagsen said AI technology has given him a new way to explore his own creative ideas. However, he has heard the promise of “enhanced creativity” before – when the computer was invented, when digital cameras became popular, and with the advent of the smartphone. He said he also didn’t see a boom in the number of new creatives at the time — just already creative people exploring new ways of creating art.
“Over the past two years of AI hype, OpenAI and its ilk have been extremely careful not to directly attack workers,” Zitron told BI. “What Murati is saying here – that some creative jobs ‘shouldn’t have existed in the first place’ – is an outright declaration of war on creative work, clearly stating that OpenAI believes that not only certain parts of creativity are ‘ineffective’, but that OpenAI will be part of the ‘fix’ process.”
Zitron said he believes AI is nearing the top of the S-curve, with limited progress to be made, and that Murati, Sam Altman and the rest of OpenAI are “desperate to suggest that we are on the point of having an AGI or some sort of magnificent machine that can do the work of a hundred thousand people.”
Such a suggestion helps keep the money flowing as companies clamor for the latest version of a promising new technology that promises to make their workplace faster, more efficient and cheaper to run.
“The AI output is mediocre, barely reaching the quality required by the task,” Zitron said. “But managers are so often removed from the process that they want mediocrity, even if it ends up making the rest of the project worse.”