In the “Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem questions whether or not culture should be treated as property. Of course, we currently treat culture as the property of its creators—or more accurately its copyright owners–so that these creators can make money from their creations, which, ideally, would encourage creative expression. At the same time, though copyright laws discourage the free use of these creative works by other artists and creators. What do you think of this situation? Should culture be treated as property or not? Why or why not?

My thoughts on the article, “The Future Of Writing Is A Lot Like Hip-Hop” by Stephen Marche is that AI has a lot of possibilities and can be used for many different things. Though AI has its limitations. Stephen has come across multiple problems while using AI such as asking the AI to copy the writing style of another author. This brings us to the argument on whether AI is ruining creativity, but according to Stephen Marche, he thinks that creativity in not just writing but also in movies has died as well. Personally, I think that AI has its advantages, but it has its limitations, giving a simple prompt and the outcome of what AI generates is basically what it takes after what it has already seen and just applies it to its own answer.

My opinion on “The future of writing is a lot like hip-hop” is that the article discusses how much art is starting to evolve in modern society as technology is also advancing how technology will now be used to make art and Do people agree with this or don’t agree with this? Is it considered to be real art? or is it cheating? I believe we should keep art the way it is now, without any technology.

My thoughts about the article that Mache wrote was he did indicate that people assume that AI is going to ruin creativity however Mache thinks AI is just nothing but a generator with it’s good and bad sides. As he said that AI was just a machine I agree with that because it just generates what it command to do. I do believe it will be a popular thing since many people use it for generating something such as a song or novel. Only with the information it receives from the person. -Helen Castro

According to the article “The future of writing is a lot like Hip Hop” by Stephen Marche. He expresses the idea of AI software cheats human originality and kills creativity. On the other hand, the author “Stephen Marche” explains how the software is a derivative of another person’s work. The machine is only fed by what the user inputs into the machine. However, in my opinion the future of writing is indeed a lot like hip hop. A lot of people who have the same idea to an answer, in their own respected view. The work in creative writing to any idea will relatively be the same outcome to the answer. Although this may not be an issue because it can be used as an advantage. But finally, this AI software will hurt individuals with their creative skills and kill uniqueness.

Although AI has been around for a while, I believe that recently it has begun to gain attraction and will become the next big thing. There is a major debate about it, as the reading mentioned. When it comes to things like using technology to write a paper, some people prefer the idea of making it easy while others believe it kills originality. I myself don’t like the concept, especially after discovering that recently an AI-generated work of “art” received an award rather than other art that were worked on for days and nights from actual artists. I agree with the opponents of this because it actually ruins creative thinking and is being used to gain an advantage over others. I truly believe that one day everything will be AI, and nobody will want to make something using their own knowledge and skills. Instead they’ll just look it up on the AI’s search bar because it’s the easy way out.

My opinion on Marche’s article is that he has a good point and he is coming from a place of more understanding about the topic compared to the other people who talk about the topic. Many people don’t actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to AI and its effects on art and creativity because all they do is ask it a question or give it a prompt and because it gives them something legible they think AI can do anything but when that piece of writing is examined by someone who has a deeper knowledge in linguistics or writing and the process of writing, the story changes from, ‘wow this is incredible’ to ‘eh this is ok but here is what I would change’. This is shown in Marche’s article because he actually used AI to write a book and he basically said its very literal and can’t be more flexible or creative when he gave it prompts like ‘write as this person’. As he wrote about his experience I realized that AI is just a machine. Yes this is obvious but I mean there is nothing going on in its brain, so to speak. It is intelligent but it’s not smart, it can’t think and produce its own intellectual thoughts and make certain connections the way that people can. It’s just spitting back information based on certain parameters that a human gives it. Calling it artificial intelligence is almost misleading because it’s really just a ‘complex information processing’ machine. It just shows you the most common, popular, and agreed upon things other people have done and said and collects the information you need based on the prompts you give it. It just does it in a way that makes it look like it’s producing original thought but it’s just regurgitating information rather than making intricate connections, theories and ideas like humans do. It’s essentially just a bunch of code being told what to do. It cannot think for itself. And unless there is a real life Tony Stark and Infinity Stone, I don’t think AI is going from Jarvis to Ultron anytime soon. To end this post, my final conclusions are that Marche did a really good job of showing his understanding of the topic he was talking about and actually having some basis for what he’s saying since he is very knowledgable in the topic of writing and he actually wrote a book using AI. He was able to give a different and more educated perspective on the topic. He also provided good ‘evidence’ and references on the topic for readers to draw their own conclusions if they want to, but I think for me its pretty clear that AI is not as smart as humans and can’t do some important things that humans can so the probability of it destroying all art is not as likely as I thought it was before I read the article.

Test