My recent piece "Thoughts on the Generative AI Creative Economy: there will be blood" (https://samim.io/p/2018-04-19-find-it-comedic-how-professional-digital-creative-tools/) generated some discussion on reddit, with people asking "is this concern real or just doom & gloom? Are there concrete examples?" Read my response here:
Beyond doom and gloom, there is hope: The vision/opportunity I sense is phenomenal: Creative AI tools could help raise the global level of literacy, creativity and empathy, by dramatically shortening the time of thought to highly communicative (possibly multimodal) artefacts. Many moons ago I wrote this extensive piece on the sector, from a more hopeful, slightly utopian perspective: https://medium.com/@creativeai/creativeai-9d4b2346faf3
Yet the reality of creative industries today looks very different: Advertising runs the show (see Google etc) - which is really just a synonym for either "spam" or "social engineering" - both horrible for societies in times of climate change - and not conducive as objective functions for more creativity or education. In the sense of raw reach & economic impact, the advertising industry is arguably the most powerful "art form" of the 21st century. And so when you ask for "concrete example" of dystopian generative systems, we must look at developments in this area.
One of the influential developer of creative tools - Adobe - recently has doubled down on the intersection of """AI""" and """Creativity""", with their "Sensei" Initiative. Guess who they are targeting with their tools? Yes, Advertisers. In the sector of advertising, the quality VS quantity debate is very different: it is NOT about the values of art in the classical sense, or about storytelling or other humane things - it is about naked money. This is a clearly parameterized signal to feed to machines as loss/reward-function - and due to this fake clarity, such systems can grow like cancer.
Such economic success is precisely what drives humans to extend generative advertising logic to other creative fields. Repetitive generative muzak in the charts and endlessly boring superhero movie rehashes on the screen are a reality already today, and all using some form of "optimisation" algorithms. And so we see the rise of "creative" botnets - the rise of fake news and ever more fractaline simulacra's (see this post: https://samim.io/p/2018-04-23-the-solution-to-exploding-fake-news-and-spam-botnets-ca/)
I personally do not agree with the politics and dynamics of the visions outlined here. My writing is meant as a warning pointer in search space. We must strive towards more appealing outcomes, for humanities sanity and well-being in times of climate change might very well depend on it.