Each month the members of
, an international group of illustrators, write about a common topic. In June we are discussing Ai, artificial intelligence and its impact on our work as artists, authors and humans in general.Lately, artificial intelligence has become a very controversial topic with popular apps cutting shortcuts through creative process and intellectual property of artists and authors. No matter on which side of the discussion we stand, Ai is everywhere, tracking our movement and recording our everyday. It helps us navigate through the streets, suggests words we type and food items we buy, it recognises our face and reads our mind while it keeps us safely in our bubbles, isolated from the rest of the world, slowly and collectively losing the ability to think for ourselves.
This is why the news that broke out last week about a miraculous survival of children in Columbian wilderness felt like totally unbelievable, Ai generated movie script: four siblings, aged 13, 9, 4 and one year survived a cessna plain crash in the Amazon rain forest that killed all the adults, including their mother. The children, members of Huitoto Indigenous group, then left the crash site, wandering around and managing to keep themselves, including the baby, alive until they were found 40 days later.
The crash site (left) and some objects that were found away from it, giving rescuers hope that children were still alive. (photo AP, Colombian Army)
The whole of Columbia sprang into action to find the children, they searched for them on the ground, through dense and dangerous jungle, and dropped supplies, reassuring audio recordings and leaflets with survival instructions from the air. The brave siblings, led by their big sister, used all the ancestral knowledge and experience that had been passed down through generations to find safe food, make shelter and protect themselves from dangerous wildlife.
What it took for this huge rescue operation to succeed was the spirit of community, good old fashioned resourcefulness and raw human determination (plus some clever tracking canines) - not technology that relies on algorithms, battery life and gps signals.
So coming back to my Ai article I don’t really have a clear opinion - I will let people, more clever than me, determine the future of Ai, as it will definitely become a part of our future. I just hope we can have some sensible guardrails in place so we harness this new technology for good of all humanity - because humanity must be preserved at all cost ❤️.
The spirit of community, good old fashioned resourcefulness and raw human determination (plus some clever tracking canines) were needed for this rescue operation, not technology that relies on algorithms, battery life and gps signals.
You can read other Illoguild members’ thoughts on Ai if you visit
Substack.