Edinburgh International Book Festival: The future of creativity in the age of AI
The Edinburgh International Book Festival is an event that aims to 'celebrate and share the power of writers, their ideas, and the words they craft'. The festival welcomes hundreds of world-renowned authors, journalists, scientists, and artists to the Scottish capital for just over two weeks every August. This year there was one question on everyone's minds: what is the future of creativity in the age of AI?
Each year the Edinburgh International Book Festival works around a central theme. This year it was Repair. The festival's CEO and Director Jenny Niven explains how this theme 'starts from the belief that the brilliant ideas of writers and thinkers can help us repair a host of seemingly 'broken' things in our society'. Alongside this, however, I began to sense another common theme at play: AI.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, has been expanding and infiltrating many aspects of our lives. Author and translator Annelise Finegan likened it to mercury, the liquid element that seeps and spreads uncontrollably when spilt.
As a university student, I am all too aware of the lightning fast speed at which AI has become part of our day-to-day lives. Emails from my department inform me of the dos and don'ts of using AI in academic practice, but how they would they know if we used it I am unsure. And this gets to the heart of why it is so terrifying; it works by imitating our language, our voices, our art.
The very first event I attended at the Book Festival this year raised the question of AI's role in the creative industries. This was an event with our much-loved Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Armitage was invited to discuss and read from his new poetry collection Dwell. This pocket-sized book is designed to illuminate the natural world around us, encouraging readers to 'dwell' in the feelings that nature inspires in us.
Yet, despite the ecological focus of the event, the topic of AI quickly became unavoidable. An audience question led the poet to admit that AI could produce a very Armitage-like poem about a dog and, worse still, it was a pretty decent one.
I am sure Armitage is not the only creative curious enough to test the generative powers of AI, and that he is not alone in finding the result of this research to be so horrifying. I could sense anxiety in the audience's silence as we contemplated AI's very real threat to humans in the creative industries.
The anxiety is one that grips many of us in Arts and Humanities-based careers. Despite this, I would like to remind readers that there is still hope; the word humanities stems from the noun 'human' after all. This hope is made apparent through the work of literary translators.
In a fascinating conversation between Jen Calleja and Annelise Finegan, two International Booker nominated translators, both advocated for the uniquely human touch required for the delicate art of literary translation. While AI may be able to translate word-for-word what the original text says, it does not yet possess the capability of translating voices and culture.
As I learned from this event, literary translation requires the translator to read the text several times in its original language to build a sense of the voice behind it. Even if they used AI to produce a 'first draft' of the translated work they would risk losing this sense of voice; it would be like building a house on a bad foundation. Literary translation is about movement, not just from one language to another, but from one culture to another culture. How is AI meant to replicate this if it has not experienced the depth and variety of human cultures?
To say that AI will not play some part in the future of creative industries would be a delusion, however tempting it might be to believe it. Yet, I am reluctant to accept that it will ever replace the need for real humans in the industry.
I would also argue that a huge aspect of art is the motivation behind it. AI simply does not have the same motivation as any real person trying to convey a distinctly human emotion. In an increasingly digital world, we need these connections to our own and other people's emotions more than ever.
The Book Festival reminded me that there is no better way to achieve that then by accessing another human's creative output.