“AI and Future of Tech-Art”

Artificial Intelligence and AI based tools are disrupting every industry. Art industry is not spared. A general popular belief is that AI can’t be as creative as humans therefore any industry based on creativity won’t be impacted by the onslaught of AI. Contrary to this popular belief, the current developments show quite an opposite picture.

Will AI replace humans in creative fields or would it just be an obedient and efficient assistant to humans who could then be freed from mundane tasks, to unleash their true creative potential? This is a critical question that is being asked time and again.

The past few months since the third quarter of 2022 have been quite action packed with the stormy entry of OpenAI’s chatGPT into the public domain, ‘Dall-E2’ and ‘midjourney’ becoming household names, artists protesting through campaigns such as “Artists against AI” and news stories about the legal battles arising from the ethical and legal tangles that have arisen from the influx of business activities in an unchartered territory.

While all this has led to a lot of interest and emotional involvement in AI, many of the questions are still unanswered. The panel discussion “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Tech-Art: What’s Next?” at the NGMA, Mumbai on 25^th May 2023 precisely aimed to find out those answers for every art lover. This event was organized by ‘Avid Learning’ in association with the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, and Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

This discussion was held with an interesting set of four panel members from diverse backgrounds and expertise related to art and AI. They were, Abhinav Aggarwal – Co-Founder and CEO of Fluid AI, Prateek Arora – Indian SciFi creator, Screenwriter and VP of Development of Bang Bang Mediacorp, Mansoor Khan – Co-Founder and CEO of beatoven.ai and Ms Pankhuri Upadhyay – Founder of Maker’s Legal. The discussion was moderated by Ms Sanjana Shah – Creative Director, Tao Art Gallery.

Prateek Arora who is a Sci-Fi movie lover shared his experiences and views about Science Fiction as a neglected genre in India and how AI has opened the opportunity to make it a worthwhile business preposition in the Indian movie business. He emphasized that with AI tools becoming available for common man, youngsters can enter the creative space with relative ease even in India. He mentioned that at present, AI tools are still imperfect and as a creative person those imperfections are interesting. He made a valid point on how the overall quality standard of creative businesses is going to enhance due to availability of AI tools.

Abhinav Aggarwal who is a proud author of a fully AI generated book “Bridging the AI gap”, started off by briefly summarizing the phases of development of AI – From a basic computational logic to algorithm and then to Supervised AI and finally upto the present generative AI and emergent AI of the future. With everyday examples of AI applications such as predictive text and shopping list suggestions, he emphasized that regular usage and familiarity with AI will help users to be more AI friendly and open to its use and the open to embrace change that it is bringing to their lives. He claimed that every creative human gets inspiration from other artists and what AI is doing is not very different than that, the only difference is that it is able to do it faster and upscaled.

Mansoor Khan who is a seventh generation Sitar player member of a family of musicians, introduced his pathbreaking business model of beatoven.ai. It offers solutions for consumers of online music in a customized manner, while rightfully compensating the original music artists for their creations for his company. He further elaborated how music industry is poised to make use of AI based services in a scaled-up manner, even though with giant global music businesses such as Sony have a tight grip on the legal issues such as music piracy. In a nutshell, he quipped, “beatoven.ai is the chatGPT for music. Solves the search problem of royalty-free music.”

Pankhuri Upadhyay elaborated on serious ethical issues such as copyright, discrimination, and unethical use cases. She further clarified that there is no single law that controls all issues arising from AI and shared updates on how the legal systems across different parts of the world are gearing up to tackle these issues, the EU being the frontrunner. She quoted the classic lawsuit of Getty Images Vs Stable Diffusion which is currently going on in a UK court, which made it clear that things are yet unsettled. She further shared updates about India’s stand in the AI field and how Niti Aayog has provided the guidelines for ethical and productive use of AI in India and IndiaAI being the Think-tank available as a resource centre. “Responsible AI for all” is the tagline of Niti Aayog which sums up aspects of ethics and inclusiveness.

Some key takeaways from the discussion were – AI is an incredible tool which can be used effectively by humans to enhance their productivity while it is not taking away their creativity. AI will add value to creative work and will do it faster than humans. AI is being recognized as a legitimate tool and being commercialized in the art world even though there are threats such as unethical use of deepfake technology to create havoc in society and financial markets. The AI economy is a ‘Prosumer economy” wherein consumers and producers are not distinct, hence it is more dynamic than traditional economy model.

The panel summarized the skills that would be necessary for those wanting to enter and benefit from the AI revolution – command over English language and skill to give effective prompts to AI, Focus on your individuality, Not be a mediocre who copies from other artists, Need to learn an appropriate working style and prompting skills, Awareness about ethical and legal aspects of AI, Documenting India centric datasets and using them to train AI to make it more useful and relevant to masses.

The panel discussion helped art lover audience to find some answers while evoking their interest to ask more questions on the future of AI and Art developing together.

Vineel Bhurke