I joke about being ready for the robot uprising all the time, I changed my phone’s name to AI Overlord a couple of years ago and truly believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) hasn’t peaked yet. Not because AI is smarter than us, but mostly because software engineers are usually people who are curious enough to keep tweaking and developing something just for the fun of it. It also doesn’t hurt that the capitalist machine incentivizes innovation that saves money, especially by reducing wages and employment.

AI is no longer a concept that messes with your mind after binge-watching the latest season of Black Mirror, you can experience it yourself by asking ChatGPT to write you an article or asking for art from DALL-E. These might be the bigger names, but you can find even more interesting implementations from BOBA an AI dating coaching app to DEEP NOSTALGIA, an app that can animate family photos for you.

To be honest, AI isn’t really intelligence in the way you and I think of it. A machine still can’t have an “AHA!” moment, but it can learn from patterns and incomprehensible amounts of data. Which is probably why many of these AI apps become less like HAL 9000 and more like Microsoft’s Clippy when you try to use them in non-western regions. There isn’t enough local data that’s useful to it.

I asked AI-Article Writer 4.0 to write an article about Kashtas in Kuwait, and it read like a spam website from the early 2000s. It repeated the keywords, suggest adding a section about Kashtas and the Ottoman rule, and didn’t include anything at all about the actual practice. The same thing happens when you try asking DALL-E to create Arab-inspired art. It is so stereotypical that it feels like stock imagery, or it looks so futuristic that it doesn’t feel relatable at all.

While we do create a lot of content in the region, the bulk of it is social media. Ephemeral and missing a lot of our cultural context. Maybe in the future, when there is more regionally created content that actually represents our rich heritage, knowledge, art and cultures, the machines will have an easier time creating content

As someone who works in the creative field, I don’t think AI is going to take my job away tomorrow, but I do believe that we will need to keep leveling up to stay ahead of the game. There might come a day when we can’t keep up. However, there are many tasks that AI can help with, from writing emails to creating social media captions and suggesting catchy titles. Even if these tools just provide an outline which I can then tweak, they are time savers, and I can see more and more people wanting to streamline their processes at work, so they have more spare time to pursue the creative endeavors that interest them.

Featured image was created using DALL-E mini.