One of my subscribers took the Paul Harding sentence and ran it through the AI program, Stable Diffusion, which changes text into images. So is text now worth a thousand pictures?
The Harding sentence:
And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.”
– Paul Harding, Tinkers
The resulting images:
What do you think? Is AI going to make the artist obsolete? The writer?
Or: which one do you like best?
Absolutely not. The images don't strike me at all like the words ax in the wood does. Besides, these images call up one person's image of sorrow. But not mine. My pictures would be completely different, not drowned in red, for example.
Fun to think of ordering a sci fi murder mystery written by a mash of Barbara Kingsolver, Chinua Achebe, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The day is coming. But while AI looks to the past, humans remain present with imaginations that aren't confined by past examples.