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Photographer Miles Astray decided to play a trick: submit a real photo in an AI-themed competition.

The photo was taken on Aruba Island. In the frozen picture, the flamingo bends its neck and scratches its belly with its beak. It seems to have no head and looks like many AI pictures, somewhat unreal.

Ultimately, the photo won the Jury Prize and the Popular Vote Award, but was disqualified after Miles Astray came forward.

The performance art was completed, proving that human creation has not been defeated by AI. The photographer wrote on Instagram: "Nature and the humans who interpret it can still outperform machines."

There are many more old-fashioned and stubborn people like Miles Astray who call for the glory of human creation when AI enters the mainstream.

1,200 artists take turns to draw a work that has nothing to do with AI

When AI can generate text, pictures and even videos in a few seconds, and everyone can "create" art, how can those human works that are hand-crafted using ancient methods, stroke by stroke, distinguish themselves?

Beth Spencer, an American freelance illustrator, came up with a stupid idea. One day when she was slacking off, she picked up her iPad and spent 5 minutes drawing a logo.

Unlike many smooth AI paintings, its brushstrokes are simple and the style is naive, but full of vitality, like a pattern in a children's picture book, with the words "created with human intelligence" written on it in English.

Then, she shared the logo on her blog, where everyone can download it for free and use it on their own websites, posts, and portfolios to inform visitors that these creations have nothing to do with AI.

Beth Spencer originally thought that having two or three people responding was already a good idea, but on the first day of the release, about 50 artists and writers expressed their willingness to use the logo.

She realized that she had perhaps struck a chord with someone who hadn’t yet expressed it, so she decided to go all out and posted the logo on Instagram, inviting more artists to redraw it in their own style and with a variety of tools. Of course, AI was excluded.

An interesting and humane relay has begun. From June to now, nearly 1,200 artists from all over the world have participated in it, each showing their talents.

British designer Poppy Prudden created a collage using hand-painted paper and colored pencils, and placed it on her desk where she was working.

▲ Image from: Instagram @poppyprudden

Colombian clay animation artist Mateo Montoya spent about two days to complete a work similar to the style of "Shaun the Sheep", which received 18,000 likes.

The hand holding the red pencil is made from a type of clay called cold porcelain, which was then covered with acrylic paint. The coat and shirt sleeves on the arms are made of fabric, as you can see with the naked eye.

▲ Image from: Instagram @clayman_illustration

Posting the work, the artist wrote in Spanish: "I once read a sign in a bakery that says what is made with heart is made with hands."

Samantha Dion Baker, a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and teacher, paints with pencil, ink and watercolor, believing that the emotions evoked by hand-drawn lines cannot be easily replicated.

▲ Images from: Instagram @sdionbakerdesign, thornockstudios

In addition to hand-drawing, some artists also express themselves digitally. Christopher Thornock, an American freelance illustrator and professor of illustration, uses Procreate and custom brushes on iPad to create a pencil drawing.

There are more such works under the Instagram topic "#hibadge2024". Ink, crayons, colored pencils, watercolors, clay, collages, and digital paintings have all become tools for artists to express their creativity.

The works themselves are pleasing to the eye, but what is more important is the ideas they convey.

As the saying goes, "Literature carries the message". Since ancient times, art is not only for appreciation, but also for communication and expression of ideas. When AI brings anxiety equally, artists feel that they should unite and prove that they are still irreplaceable.

Readers may wonder, are these artists stubbornly conservative, like the unemployed handloom weavers who destroyed their automatic looms during the Luddite movement?

Beth Spencer, who initiated the relay, is not completely against AI. Perhaps she will use AI to create works in the future, but at least for now, the pictures generated by AI have not left a good impression on her.

They all feel a bit greasy, like they were dipped in oil, and people get tired of seeing shiny images.

AI is advancing by leaps and bounds, and it is not impossible for it to surpass humans. Rather than saying that the texts, music, and videos created by humans are more valuable than AI, it is better to say that these artists do not want to be deprived of the feeling of creation at all costs.

The more likely something is to be lost, the more it needs to be emphasized and seen.

AI should also be cited, not taken for granted

Put a sticker on your non-AI original content.

Before Beth Spencer, a similar campaign had been launched in early 2023 - "Not By AI".

▲ More than 280,000 web pages are using Not By AI stickers

Whether it is a website, video, book or artistic creation, for non-commercial works, as long as the original human content reaches 90%, you can use this electronic sticker for free. If it is for commercial use, you can also register and pay for it.

What is the remaining 10%? It can be using AI to translate, find inspiration, correct grammatical errors, perform search engine optimization, etc. Therefore, Not By AI does not deny AI, but is people-oriented and supplemented by AI.

Not By AI is created to encourage people to continue to produce original content and allow these original contents to be noticed.

As for whether the requirement of 90% originality is met, "Not By AI" will conduct manual verification on paying users and may use detection tools later, but the content creators themselves are the ones who bear the primary responsibility and make commitments to readers.

In order to demonstrate the spirit of originality, "Not By AI" stated that all their designs were made by designers using Figma, Sketch and Photoshop, and that the AI-generated fill function was not used.

▲ Schematic diagram of using Not By AI

In fact, many times, there is no original human work or AI-generated work from start to toe. The proportion of AI we use may be 20% or 30%.

After all, we don’t need to go backwards and isolate AI. But this also leads to a blurring of the boundaries of creation: what is ours? What is generated by AI?

To this end, the veteran Markdown writing software iA has come up with an alternative idea.

Last November, iA launched a new feature in Writer 7 - marking the AI-generated text copied by users into documents, and AI can also be the author.

The text generated by AI is gray, and the text you write yourself is black. If you fine-tune the AI ​​text, the rewritten part will also be black, and the colors are used to separate the two.

It is not difficult to use this function. Just copy the prompt word and answer at the same time, and iA will automatically mark the AI-generated content as gray, but we can also do it manually. iA is very Buddhist, "How honest you are to yourself depends on yourself."

This function may seem simple, but it is very meaningful. The collaboration between humans and AI has become the main theme of the AIGC era, but this does not mean that we can confidently regard the content generated by AI as our own creation.

▲ Left: Before fine-tuning, Right: After fine-tuning

We should, as iA said, "recognize what is borrowed", instead of making the excuse like Kong Yiji, "Can what scholars do be considered stealing?"

Essentially, Not By AI and iA both remind us of one thing: how to create responsibly with AI.

Creation is a process of human thinking. AI is not our ghostwriter, and AI's creation is not equal to our creation. AI should not take over our responsibilities entirely.

Whether it is marking the fruits of AI's labor or controlling the boundaries of AI's use, it is all about respecting ourselves.

Creation itself is free

The more mainstream way to distinguish AI-generated content from human creations is actually various AI detectors to prevent cheating, or watermarks to mark AI-generated content, but they are not necessarily reliable.

Starting in May, Meta will automatically label some images from social apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Threads as "Made with AI."

As a result, a mistake occurred in June when real photos of the Indian Premier League cricket match were marked as "AI-made".

AI is a broad term, and using AI is an all-encompassing concept. The work of former White House photographer Pete Souza was also "accidentally harmed." He suspected that he used Adobe tools to edit the photos, which triggered Meta's algorithm.

Meta did not explain the cause of the error, but said it would improve its methods so that labels better reflect the amount of AI used in the images.

At the same time, AI-generated content accounts for an increasing proportion and is getting closer and closer to human levels.

AI-generated marketing copy for Xiaohongshu, AI-flavored subway ads and software splash screens, Weibo comment robots running around everywhere... Some even predict that by 2025, 90% of Internet content will be generated by AI.

Midjourney recently updated to version v6.1, which is faster, clearer, more beautiful and closer to photography.

Since the boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred, will it still be necessary to distinguish between AI and human creations in the future?

Beth Spencer's answer is more idealistic: "No software has ever experienced the struggle and joy that we experience in creating art." Between the lines, there is a sense of "the more time passes, the better the sentence."

Faced with the invasion of technology, people always hope to retain the right to complete more difficult tasks, even if their efficiency is not as good as AI.

As a popular internet meme goes: I want AI to do my housework so I can have more time for art and writing, not the other way around.

Wired magazine wrote an article explaining its principles for using generative AI, one of which is not to publish stories with AI-generated text.

It’s not just because AI is boring, prone to errors, biased, or unintentionally plagiarizes other people’s texts, but also because people who make a living by writing have a responsibility to constantly think about how to express complex ideas in their own language.

There is also a person in history who put creation itself in the supreme position. Lu Xun once said that Cao Pi's era was "the era of literary self-awareness" because he proposed that poetry and prose do not need to contain lessons.

This means that articles do not always have to make sense, but rather pursue aesthetics, art for art's sake, which is almost contrary to the Confucian "establishing words". This is a bit like the development of photography, in addition to imitating nature, art can also be more abstract, and the artist's unique personal expression is highlighted.

At this point, we can better understand why artists place so much emphasis on "human creation".

Writing articles and drawing pictures with your own pen and ink, creating for the sake of creation, is a kind of self-awareness and freedom of my hand writing my heart. This is not inconsistent with learning AI. In fact, in a broad sense, learning prompt words to generate better results is also creation.

Standing today, we are still more easily moved by human works, and it is easy to appreciate their sincerity in creation and their more demanding pursuit of beauty.

Perhaps many years later, the boundary between AI and human creations will eventually disappear, and we will only judge the quality of their creations based on beauty itself. Your body and name will perish, but the rivers and mountains will flow forever, and beauty itself is immortal.