Can AI Write A Story: Thinking about AI as a tool in the creative arts

By Mylie Norton, Staff Writer

Connor Jeffries and Pallavi Koppol spoke to Long Island University (LIU) students on Tuesday, Nov. 12 in the Steinberg Art Gallery to discuss their knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it has impacted the world of creative arts. 

Jeffries and Koppol work at Databricks, a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company. Databricks helps build, interpret and enhance data to further research in AI. Jeffries and Koppol specialize in the research arm of the company and artificial intelligence, Mosaic Databricks.

Jeffries has a background in journalism from working with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Koppol has studied robotics working on self-driving cars and other technological advancements. 

Throughout their discussion, LIU students voiced concerns about AI and the threat it poses on the creative arts. Students discussed potential threats in journalism, acting, film and media. 

Jeffreries and Koppol reassured students that AI is a tool that can be used in the arts, rather than a destruction. 

“I really hope that we will trend in a direction where we’re talking more about augmentation rather than automation,” said Koppol “I think that is the key difference. So not replacing people, but rather trying to enable people to do more than they were able to before, experiment with AI as a new design medium.” 

Augmentation is the process of increasing the size, value or quality of something by adding to the object. Augmented intelligence is a human-centered design pattern that uses  AIto enhance human performance. Koppol discusses AI being used more as augmentation rather than automation.

Automation is using AI to complete tasks and processes that would typically be done by a human. The fear of automation is real and was covered by Jefferies and Koppol. 

Jefferies mentioned a company, Pudding, that attempted to replace journalism and journalist tasks completely by using AI. This attempt failed.  

“[Pudding] really did the legwork to see if you could replace a journalist in its entirety and I think that went really poorly but they did some interesting analysis on where these LLMs (large language models) in the discrete points of building a story and telling a story can have impact,” said Jefferies. “I hope that is where things are trending and it seems to be the case so that’s an encouraging sign.”  

The attempts to change journalism and the arts we know have been happening over time however people prefer the standard, traditional stance. Jefferies and Koppol who have strong backgrounds in this field are reassuring individuals that are concerned with these changes. 

While AI is a technology that may have the power to take over human jobs and tasks, it can also be used as a tool to aid in creative developments. As AI is used in an augmentative setting, humans remain in control of the device to prevent automation.