It is not surprising, but still dismaying, to notice more and more people using AI-generated material, especially when it comes to the promotional aspects of their creative work. (So I’m not talking here about works that engage with AI directly as a form or conceit, but rather those that use AI, if you like, as a tool in the manufacturing process). This is most apparent in graphics and copywriting: Book covers with inhuman hands, theatre posters with splotchy lines or illogical details, social media posts with that unmistakable whiff of ChatGPTisms. 

I’ve refrained from calling out such instances directly, although many of these people are my acquaintances, even friends, because I understand the position they’re in. When creative work these days is being produced on razor-thin margins, the difference between whether you hire a human illustrator / copywriter / translator / etc. could make or break the budget, which more often than not is coming out of the creator’s pocket in the first place. What is the alternative—to not create? And before AI came along, it’s likely that these specific tasks wouldn’t have been paid gigs anyway—they may have just gotten someone in their team, or call upon a friend’s favour, to throw together something simple. 

I watched a theatre show some years ago—performed in Mandarin, but with English surtitles. The surtitles, I could tell, were translated by AI. To be honest, they were functional enough. I appreciated that the team was trying to broaden their audience, make the show more accessible. If they hadn’t allowed themselves to use this technology, would the choice of hiring a translator hold up to a cost-benefit analysis? Probably not. The same goes for all the promotional aspects I’ve mentioned. If you don’t zoom into said posters (and most people won’t), nothing would seem amiss. These materials would perform their function just fine.  

So maybe it’s just the economic reality of the creative economy. It’s one thing, of course, when big corporations use AI designs or writing, which does meaningfully diminish the amount of paid opportunities for artists and writers. But when it’s an independent artist doing it … to be frank, it’s hardly a huge loss in actual financial terms.  

This is not to say that hiring and paying artists (and by artists I mean writers, copywriters, designers, translators, composers, illustrators, typesetters, etc.) is an impossibility. I know of (and have been involved in) productions that did make the effort to pay for these seemingly “minor” aspects. Even if the pay was just a token amount, I’ve always admired the effort, because it is an effort that is in spite, not because, of the circumstances of the industry.   

So—so what? Ultimately, is anything really lost if people use AI for their personal, self-funded projects?  

I think yes. Maybe not in financial terms. But the loss will be more insidious and corrupting. 

The first thing, I think, is people will start to settle for less. What will proliferate are creations that don’t pay attention to finer details, that gloss over nuance and subtleties, that don’t meaningfully push against any boundaries, that are imprecise and non-rigorous in their thinking and methods and objectives and aesthetics, that reach for nothing but the average of everything. This atrophy will spread, not just among creators, but the audience as well, in a feedback loop that spirals into its own shrinking shell. People are already not noticing these things; they will start to notice even less.  

The second, and what I think is worse, is that our sense of community will fray and splinter. Theatremakers won’t work with photographers, poets won’t chat with illustrators, filmmakers won’t look for translators, installation artists won’t collaborate with musicians, chefs won’t invite food reviewers. AI will supply all these “supplementary” elements, becoming the background and bolster of most creative products that will exist in a vacuum devoid of interdisciplinary fertilisation.  

It’s a shame as so much of Malaysian art is rich because of such collaboration. I think of groups like the Five Arts Centre and Dabble Dabble Jer Collective, founded upon the very premise that we should actively engage in multidisciplinary methodologies. I think of the weekend when I attended Instant Café’s What the Elders Left Us festival. Lee Joo For the playwright was also Lee Joo For the programme designer. Readers of a play were able to turn into interpreters on the spot.  

There is so much human talent and human drive. Even if not every act of creative labour can be compensated, what is formed in such interactions is the notion of a community. And what this community does, besides support and enrich each other, is also to encourage non-professional / amateur / emerging talents and allow them opportunities to try creating, and fail, and try again. The journey of any creative begins with a single step, but if AI is replacing those first, second, third steps, how are you supposed to suddenly take the tenth step, let alone the thousandth?  

I don’t want to romanticise unpaid creative labour. Pay people, if you can. Even a token fee is better than nothing. But if you can’t—I don’t know. I don’t have easy answers. It’s not always easy to find people willing to work with you (or whom you want to work with), not to mention if you can’t pay them.  

So this becomes a prisoner’s dilemma. If you’re the only one not caving in to the ease and efficiency of AI, you may find yourself unable to fulfil the needs of your project. Yet if everyone takes the path of least resistance and constantly uses AI for such “menial” aspects of their work, in the long run we will lose out on better art, better artists, better audiences, as well as community and development.  

Someone told me yesterday that there are fewer than a hundred tigers left in Malaysia. (Another commenter later corrected that figure to 150.) It’s shocking either way—I would have guessed a few hundred. We don’t realise how few there are left now, he said, because we’re still constantly surrounded by images and symbols of tigers. In advertising, logos, sports team, news photos, textbooks, art.  

It is possible, as AI continues persuading us to delegate creative tasks to its slick, capable “hands”, that we will not realise how many human artists and how much collaboration we are losing, from this generation and the next, because we would still be surrounded, bombarded even, by simulations of artistic products.  

All I know is that, as an audience member, I would always prefer human imperfection over AI glossiness.  

But I am interested in hearing what people think, especially those who are also involved in the arts, or have even used AI-generated material before. I’m interested in discussion, not castigation. This think piece is after all inspired by not just the collectives and events I’d mentioned, but also recent conversations with good friends. Because hey, sometimes you can talk to other human beings, not just AI, to generate and consolidate ideas! 

If this piece resonates with you, reader, I invite you to translate it into another language and share it. (For obvious reasons, I don’t want to leave the translation to a machine. Why should I trust AI more than I trust people.) I won’t be able to pay you if you choose to undertake this translation, but I can belanja you kopi if we ever meet. We can call that kopi an act of community building.