Experimenting with various AI programs this week to create extraordinary, puzzling, comic and beautiful images, I am thinking a lot about plagiarism on HIVE, the legitimacy of AI generated images as 'art' as we know it, truth, reality and ethics. I'm not the only one - AI art has exploded across the internet galaxies. Whilst we know it has been coming, like with many technologies, we are not entirely prepared.

^{Image created via Jasper, input words pleurotus ostreatus, botanical drawing, green, white, black, ink}

It does, however, explain a lot to me about some of the articles I occasionally read as a curator on HIVE. They seem legitimate - a little dull and formulaic, and sometimes slightly odd - but my plagiarism radar starts to fire. Whilst I do paste such content into checkers, it never comes up as stolen, yet there is something inherently off about it.

Take this paragraph created in Jasper. I'd asked it to write an article about growing your own mushrooms. The sentences in bold were begun by the program, drawing on the key word I had inputted - 'environment'. At that point it stopped, and would likely continue to repeat itself and even write nonsense had I not stepped in and added a few key words, in this case, 'water', 'transport', 'climate change'. Another click of the 'compose' button and Jasper came up with a few more sentences.

Mushroom cultivation is also a great way to help the environment. Mushrooms require very little energy and resources to produce, so they have a much smaller environmental footprint than other forms of agriculture. Additionally, mushrooms use water much more efficiently than other crops. Growing your own mushrooms also reduces the amount of transport needed to bring them from far away sources, helping reduce climate change-causing emissions. And by growing them in a controlled environment at home, you're taking action against climate change too!

As a curator on Hive, it made me realise why I wasn't locating the plagiarism sources for things I believed were plagiarised. Why did I believe they weren't original? Because they were impersonal, dry, matter of fact, dull paragraphs. The paragraph above is hardly comparable to this paragraph by Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life:

“Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act. When you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it. When you go out gathering mushrooms, or buy them. When you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil; and whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another. Whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act. If you’re alive, they already have.” ― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

^{Image created in Jasper via my word input}

Could I change that in Jasper? I tried adding some key words such as 'art', 'creative', 'photography', and changed the tone to 'philosophical' and 'personal'. Nope. It's still reading like a blog post.

Finally, mushroom cultivation is a great creative outlet. You can experiment with different species, substrates, and growing techniques to get unique flavors and textures. Plus, the photography opportunities are endless! There's nothing quite like snapping a picture of your freshly picked mushrooms and posting them to social media. Or you can use them as inspiration for artwork – drawing fungi can be incredibly satisfying! Whether it's the personal story you tell through your own mushroom cultivation journey, or the art that comes out of it, growing mushrooms can be a great creative outlet.

So what was actually missing is the personal, interesting anecdote to embelish the story, a clever comparision, symbolism, metaphor. All rather dry. It's the recommendation I make most to new Hivers - what is your personal story? A human story is an interesting one. Notice it repeated itself here too - 'great creative outlet'. No reason, as an intelligent user, I couldn't go ahead and change that - for example, I could change the last line easily to read: 'an incredibly rewarding experience that feeds your creative soul'. I also thought I'd add something about spore prints art, and plugged the key words in. Now it got a little nonsense:

And spore print art is a great way to preserve the creative potential of your harvest.

Besides, it kept using 'great' as a descriptor, and started just wanting to wrap up the paragraph no matter what key words I entered. Not 'great', this article, but very mediocre. Count how many times 'mushroom' appears in this paragraph.

^{Image created in Jasper using words 'yellow oyster mushrooms' with a few other settings}

I was really starting to see two things: the quality of work is going to dependent on the intelligence of the person directing Jasper with key words and adding human embellishments here and there, and that the internet is full of rehashed sentences that the AI is simply rehashing like the worst of us. A blog post is now a generic, mass produced thing designed to sell ads. It's not personal, beautiful, or human.

It does take a high degree of literacy and skill to get Jasper to write a blog post that is captivating, thought provoking, and engaging to read. Seems like a new niche for those with a writing degree - so why not simply employ people to write good content? Is it because it's cost effective and no one cares? Or is it because no one really reads beyond the first paragraph and a quick scan these days?

The images were fun to play around with, but again, difficult to get very real. 'Woman growing mushrooms' just wasn't a hit with the AI. I couldn't imagine anything less realistic than the photographs including in this blog. Of course, it could be the user - me - inputting something the AI couldn't work with. However, 'pink oyster mushroom photograph realistic' and 'woman growing mushrooms, photograph realistic' seemed reasonable enough for me.

^{Image created in Jasper via my word input}

And 'yellow oyster mushroom, photograph', well, I'm not sure if they know what a 'yeloow oyster mushroom' is, although they look authentic with the AI signature generated on the lower right. Real one is on the right, home grown by me. Granted, the machine is still learning, but my point is some kind of intelligence has to input exactly the right words to get the exact right image.

Perhaps there is a kind of artistic expression in this skill, too - there's a reason 'AI art' has become a genre. There's also something beautiful about the images that are can be created. It is not always theiving from an artist's work, although the machines have learnt from inputting art without the artist's permission - a problem for the lawmakers and ethicists to solve. But arguably, there is something extraordinary in how the AI has taken the word for 'oyster' and 'yellow mushroom', plus a few directional tweaks with modulators such as 'photograph', 'dark background', 'cinematic lighting' from this hack.

It's quite otherwordly - and that is indeed what we are dealing with here - a whole other world.

The author and artist are not entirely dead yet - but it may be coming. However, I can imagine a scenario where we seek out human authenticity as a moral imperative. I hope for a world where we find balance, yet tip the scales a little towards human artistic endeavour. It's what shaped us, after all.

Let's just hope AI isn't shaping us, and we remain intelligent and literate enough to know the difference between what is machine constructed, and what is human created.

With Love,

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