Declaring Independence Day for Human Creators
What Future Do You Want?
TLDR
Humanity is at a cross-roads: we are all worried about the future of human creativity. Yet there’s an alternative to the sycophantic hype around generative AI. Uplifting human creators, emphasizing the insights given to us by the humanities and encouraging human creative work creates a powerful engine for both societal and technological innovation and helps us imagine how to build a positive future. Join us!
Independence Day for Human Creators
What Future Do You Want?
Human endeavors always begin with a big idea. Even the simplest acts of creation require a future plan. You don’t begin construction by merely placing bricks on the ground – you envision the shape of the entire house. You plan for the future.
This is also true of human works of art. A vision of the future animates our activity.
An artist paints a canvas and imagines their artistic masterpiece. A musician strums a chord and hears a full orchestra embellishing their melody. Even when they write the first word on the blank page, the writer is planning a long and complex novel. We begin with the end in mind.
What is the end point of this age of ideas and innovation? In this age where mathematical models are being marketed as “intelligent” AI, it’s evident that there are competing visions of the end state: we anticipate two different futures.
Here’s a brief outline of what those two futures entail, and what our team is doing to help bring one vision to life.
TWO FUTURES
Our Future Vision:
Innovation & Imagination
We imagine a future where humanity is thriving: this means that people enjoy creative work created by other people and take pleasure in studying the history of human creativity (ie. the humanities) and have the time and capacity to make art and handcrafts. Built on this solid intellectual foundation, critical thinking and technological innovation continue to make the world safer, healthier and better, continuing the positive trend lines we’ve seen over the past 100 years. These human-centered characteristics are worth protecting because they are the foundational keystones of optimistic future societies in which people are happy, healthy, fulfilled and functioning. It is a future where people of all cultures create works that have enduring cultural value for the next generation of humanity to enjoy.
There are many who share this positive vision, from The Center for Humane Technology to the Distributed AI Research Institute to organizations like FairlyTrained, the Algorithmic Justice League and our own team at The Human IntelligenceTM Institute.
Let’s itemize the critical elements in this story of our shared hopeful future:
Fiction for Empathy: Research demonstrates that reading/writing fiction increases empathy, imagination & deeper understanding of other people.
Art for Purpose & Well-Being: Creating fiction, art, and handcrafts builds a sense of purpose and grounded well-being in a changing world. Telling our stories to each other via art creates a web of curiosity and connectivity.
Humanities for Ideas & Imagination: Studying the humanities leads to a culture flush with ideas, insight and the capacity for novelty. Critical thinking also grows with study of the humanities. Adaptability and resilience also require the insights provided by the humanities.
Humanities for Innovation: Nurturing an arts culture inspires technological advancement. In fact, any society with a strong artistic culture resounds with curiosity and becomes a flourishing mecca for innovation. It is a vibrant ecosystem in which ideas cross-pollinate and become rich with possibility.
Humans flourish in this state of well-being and fulfilling purpose. In fact, all technological and societal innovation rests on these key humanistic elements. Places with arts and culture are more resilient and cohesive. People want to live in communities that nurture the imaginative arts and the humanities.
SIX PILLARS
What Our Future Requires: And Who’s Helping
This future doesn’t make itself: our hands and our energy shape reality. And to make and sustain this future, the following pillars need to have persistent presence:
Support for Creativity: Creative expression by human beings needs to be uplifted, funded, and supported by cultures, societies and institutions.
We are encouraged to see many organizations stand up for this value.
Support for Human Creators: Human creators need to be recognized, compensated for their work and actively encouraged to continue their art.
Human.global provides a first step towards this important goal.
Support for Human Creations: Human creations need to be actively distinguished from synthetic content and need to be foregrounded as inherently distinct and intrinsically valuable because of human provenance.
Human.global will soon feature the ability to certify your works of art.
Honest Origins: Every piece of work, whether made by humans or by digital means, should clearly identify its origins and the materials used to create it. Derivative works must be properly labeled with transparent, human-readable information about the humans who created the foundational art.
The Human Intelligence™ Institute holds this as our north star.
Ownership over Art: As human beings are the only entities that can create genuine art, humans are also the only entities that have a moral right to own both the artwork itself, as well as any derivative or transformative outcomes of their art. This ownership should include long-term intellectual credits.
We are encouraged to see Fairly Trained and Cloudflare’s new “pay per crawl” initiative as steps towards fairly paying human creators.
Support for the Humanities: Human beings need the latitude and the capability to experience genuine human art and to be exposed to the creative process and the critical thinking that will help them fully enjoy art. The study of the humanities should be expanded at every institution of learning and at companies and public corporations, to ensure continued innovative growth.
The Human Intelligence™ Institute will be releasing more information on our “H.E.A.L.” initiative in the coming weeks, in service of this pillar.
We believe that the six pillars listed above are critical elements to create a world that is fulfilling, enriching and valuable for all human beings. Together, we can create a culturally and technologically advanced future that is wealthy, healthy, and wise.
Yet some people either don’t want or don’t believe in this optimistic future. In fact, they are dismantling these key pillars that form the beating heart of our free and open culture today, and gave birth to the tech and cultural revolutions of our age.
They are taking apart critical supporting beams in society’s infrastructure in order to create a hermetic and stagnant future without innovation, insight or human agency. This alternative future is both alarmingly devoid of life and grimly dystopian.
Their Future Vision:
Exnovation for Humanity
In the other future, human beings are portrayed merely as engines of capitalistic consumption – not critical thinkers or creators of art. Although noted leaders in this field forecast permanent abundance and ubiquitous AI, most of what they’ve said seems to be self-deluded fantasy at best, and self-interested lies at worst.
Although these leaders talk about a road to utopia, their path to the future leads directly to a world where human beings are not needed as active and curious participants. Instead they merely re-ingest and extrude simulacrap artifacts that bear only a surface resemblance to real art. Humans don’t have agency in this future: their purpose is to consume, not create. These people don’t require empathy and are devoid of curiosity or commitment to larger societal ideals. Decision-making is abdicated to a select group who control stochastic systems that shape an uneducated and degraded population. Given this lack of curiosity and innovative imagination, such a self-limited civilization grinds to a halt. The machine stops.
Some proclaim we are already in this downward spiral. For them, the only way out is smarter AI. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, their future is “nasty, brutish and short.”
Some of the people espousing this vision of the future have nothing except money. Others have the ear of the media, or take part in ill-informed adventures in politics. But these people are not well educated. Some of them even seem proud that they’ve never actually taken any classes in the humanities. They don’t know history or human capacity; their assumptions about the future are not a fait accompli.
Yet they are actively working to make this terrible future happen.
They’re wrong.
First, it’s a fallacy that we are on a downward spiral. The evidence that these people cite is not supported by evidence and is based on thinly sourced theories, junk philosophy or myths that radically de-center the human spirit. Secondly, just because their business interests are impacted by the uplifting of an artistic middle class doesn’t belie the fact that the larger economy always benefits when a creative middle class thrives. All too often, such thinkers mistake the symptoms for the disease. Yet the disease, all too often, is them.
Let’s enumerate exactly how these TESCREAL thinkers are attempting to destroy and dismantle the six pillars we know are essential to a truly innovative creative future.
SIX PILLARS
What Our Future Requires:
And Who’s Tearing It Down
Support for Creativity: Many of these thinkers believe that human creativity may not be needed at all in a future without educated human beings.
Support for Human Creators: Human creators are discouraged from following a creative path in our current society. As one researcher notes, STEM has been re-formulated to create “working drones”, not functioning curious humans.
Support for Human Creations: Many of these thinkers don’t seem to care that their artificial work is clearly impinging on human artists’ IP. They don’t want to support artists at all, and instead want synthetic work to replace human art.
Honest Origins: The companies who have (reluctantly) agreed to label synthetic data seem to be doing so because they will gain side benefits from their deal, or to prevent their own models from ingesting synthetic content, not from any desire to actually assist in honest labeling. AI labeling falls short.
Ownership over Art: A variety of people in the tech world have attacked intellectual property rights as somehow being less useful in the future. They don’t want human beings to have any continuing ownership over artwork.
Support for Humanities: Today, companies engaged in stealing and replicating human-made creative work do not support the humanities in any meaningful way. This is a strangely self-defeating approach, as a society without the arts is a society devoid of the capacity for curiosity or innovation. Such a society is a stagnant dead zone bereft of the artistic oxygen necessary for new ideas to proliferate, grow and flourish.
The problem is lazy thinking. Unfortunately, when we do not choose a clear alternative, history has demonstrated that the lowest price and the lowest value on human life inevitably wins.
Capitalistic entropy leads to a natural drift to the second state, which is a dystopian outcome that is sub-optimal for the human species. We must take bold and decisive action to fight for the state of reality we wish to achieve.
The Future is Yours
The Human Intelligence™ Institute strives to build a future that is full of wonder, joy, imagination and innovation. We work to create a future reality that embraces human creativity, encourages human creators and uplifts the creative economy.
Our first step towards this future is released today, on a day we’re calling Independence Day for Human Creators.
Today, we launch Human.global, a new service that allows anyone to claim their identity and establish their veracity as a certified Human Creator.
The decision is yours. Which future will you choose?