Artificial Intelligence and its (Negative) Influence on History

My Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

I’ve been sceptical of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its use in everyday life. Despite my reservations it certainly has a significant place in the future, promising to be one of the greatest inventions/revolutions in human history. Whether that’s for good or bad only time can tell.

Unlike many people I know, I have preferred to avoid actively using AI in my everyday and working life, although it is hard to escape as it seems every device comes pre-embedded with AI. Services like ChatGPT have become a staple resource in many jobs involving written texts or communication, whether for press releases, social media posts or journalism. Even the WordPress Editor that I am writing this in has AI functions. Can’t think of a title? Don’t worry, the AI will create something for you. Can’t think of an excerpt? AI has got your back!

I believe using a service like ChapGPT cannot be good for the mind in the long term. It stifles creativity and imagination in writing and prevents people from keeping their brains active. I imagine it will be something that cannot be avoided in the near future, similar to how the Internet has become such a necessity in Western life.

How I’ve Started to Use Artificial Intelligence

I have recently been experimenting at work with the Generative AI function inside Adobe Photoshop. Generative AI allows the user to add elements to an image, manipulate things and extend images beyond their normal boundary with often mixed but sometimes phenomenal results.

This feature has become especially helpful when designing this year’s prospectus. When there is a perfect photo that just doesn’t quite fit the established grid (to maintain uniformity throughout the book), I can use the Generative AI to extend the photo’s dimensions to provide more room for cropping.

Another example is creating a poster for a free breakfast deal. I used a stock image of a lady eating avocado on toast. The free breakfast deal doesn’t include avocado so I used Generative AI to add strawberry jam to her toast instead. After a few prompts she had the perfect jam on toast for the poster.

Where I have reservations about using AI for writing, others have reservations about image creation using AI. This includes services such as Midjourney. Image-based AI uses pre-existing imagery that is merged together to create new art or images. This means that original photography, artwork or illustration uploaded to the internet could be ‘stolen’ to create new artwork. It extends further into video games and film as well. And we don’t need to discuss the implications of using AI to impersonate influential figures.

Artificial Intelligence’s (Negative) Influence on History

My use of Adobe Photoshop’s Generative AI function got me thinking about the role of imagery in historical records. There are obvious implications related to impersonating audio and video of influential figures but my focus is more on local history.

One of the ways I used the Generative AI function was to remove a person’s head from the side of a photo. This was a teacher’s head leaning in to instruct a student on how to use engineering equipment. A perfectly good photo but for my purpose I didn’t want the teacher’s head in the frame and preferred the image to be purely on the student using the mechanical equipment.

This made me consider the implications of looking back to the past from some unknown time in the future. What if the only remaining record of that particular photograph is printed inside this prospectus? On the surface it doesn’t seem like a big issue, but I have just erased a part of that history. No longer is it a student being instructed on how to use equipment, it is now just a student using equipment. It has rewritten history in a small way. This may seem insignificant now and when looking at just one example, but edits to millions, billions and trillions of photos later add up to a considerable amount of erasure or addition that is historically inaccurate.

This is not to say that photographers and painters of old have not manipulated or staged their artwork. People paint in different ways, they leave out details they dislike or try to present a certain angle based on bias. Art can be very subjective to the painter and the viewer. Photographers can conveniently leave entire sections of context outside the frame of their camera to make an image more impactful. Perhaps for good, sometimes for bad. Artificial Intelligence goes far beyond these examples. While painters of the past took days, months or years to finish one painting, AI takes seconds, minutes or hours depending on how refined you wish the image to be. This is an issue of scale in comparison to the past.

My focus on the local history aspect stems from having curated a local history exhibition, almost exactly one year ago from writing this blog post. It heavily relied on imagery dating from 85 years to the present day – a lot of it was found inside old printed prospectuses. Those photos told a story in and of themselves. There were people repeated across photographs allowing me to track who they were and what they did – some were staged, most were not. I could see the imperfections of life, it wasn’t a sterile, formulated period of time – neither is this period, so why make it so?

We have a responsibility to show situations as they are for the historians of the future. We shouldn’t erase the imperfections as it will paint an unfinished and untrue picture of our time.