Last week’s podcast episode was all about how to think about change in our creative work. Change is inevitable in life, so we may as well find ways to think about it positively. After all, in many ways, when we think about it from a mindset of joy and abundance, change can be really beautiful! But what about change that has the potential to be incredibly destructive to your work and your way of life? How can you find positive ways of viewing that kind of change? Often, finding a silver lining in that kind of change feels impossible. And that predicament is exactly where a lot of creatives are finding themselves right now as we collectively, as a society, grapple with what the existence of generative artificial intelligence is going to mean for us over the short and long terms. In today’s podcast episode, we’re going to dig into AI and art.

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Hello thriving artists! My name is Jennifer Jill Araya, and I am an artist and a entrepreneurship coach for other artists, and I’m so very glad you’re here today. The topic of today’s episode, AI and art, feels very timely to me. As a society, we are just starting to grapple with the possible implications of generative AI.

But before we dig into that really sticky, really complicated topic, I do have one bit of news to share with you. Exactly two weeks from when this episode is going to initially air, on December 5, 2023, I’m going to host a free goal-setting workshop for creative entrepreneurs. I am so excited about this event! I know from personal experience how much strength and energy and motivation can come from having clearly outlined goals that are able to support you and your creative work, and this workshop is designed to help you develop exactly those kinds of goals for yourself for the coming year. To register, all you have to do is navigate to the events page on my website, which is www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events. All of the registration information is there. This event is scheduled for Tuesday, December 5, 2023, from 4-6 Eastern, and is completely free to attend. Attending live is best, since that allows you to ask questions in real time, but if you can’t attend live but are interested in the workshop, sign up anyway! I’m going to send a recording of the workshop to all registered attendees. So even if that time doesn’t work for you, you can still participate, and you can still get help crafting your business goals for 2024.

And, if you’re listening to this episode way in the future, long after it’s originally aired and long after December 5, 2023 is past, I still encourage you to visit my website’s event page. I’ll always keep that updated with the latest workshops, seminars, and classes I have available, so who knows, maybe exactly the event you’re looking for is coming up soon! That url again was www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events.

Now that I’ve shared that little tidbit of information, let’s turn to the main topic of today’s conversation: AI and art. Man, just saying those words, I get a little ball of stress in the pit of my stomach. No one knows how this society-wide experiment with generative artificial intelligence is going to turn out, and the uncertainty is pretty unsettling, to say the least.

One thing we can say for sure is that AI will impact a lot more than the world of art. It’s already changing the way everyone lives and works. In fact, just yesterday, I read an article written by a lawyer whose clients are no longer having him write their contracts; instead, his clients are going to ChatGPT to get a first draft of their contracts, and then bringing that draft to him for polishing and finalizing. Talk about a major change to the way that lawyer now works!

But that feels like a minor change compared to the existential fear that many artists feel around the subject of AI. That lawyer is still doing his contract-writing work; he’s just doing it in a different way, one that is enhanced by AI. You could even say that this lawyer’s job has just been made easier by the use of AI.

But for artists, the coming change from AI feels more threatening. If someone can take a casual photo of themselves that they took on their phone camera, put that photo into an AI machine, and spit out something that is passable as a business headshot, will people still hire photographers for headshots? If businesses can have ChatGPT write their website sales copy, will they still hire professional copywriters? At the moment, these are open questions. We don’t know the answers.

Personally, I feel this anxiety myself around my primary creative work, which is in audiobooks. After all, if authors can pay a fraction of my rate and get a voice for their audiobook that sounds like one of the major A-list actors, are there still going to be authors and publishers willing to pay me to narrate their books? I’d like to think that the answer is yes because I bring a level of humanity that AI simply cannot, but I don’t know that for sure.

And because of that last statement, that I truly don’t know, I decided to change my usual format a bit for today’s podcast episode. I’m bringing on someone who knows a lot more about the current situation that I do, and I’m going to share with you a conversation we had about AI and art.

That someone else is my husband, Arturo Araya, and I think he’s uniquely qualified to talk about this particular subject. First, he has the perspective both of an artist and of a computer scientist. He is a cellist, like I am, and he has an Artist Diploma in cello performance. He’s performed all over the world in competitions and concerts, both as a soloist and as a member of an orchestra. He toured Europe as principal cellist of the Shenzhen Symphony. And, he has also always worked in the field of technology in some way. He worked for his college’s IT department while he was a student, and his current job is as senior, team-lead software engineer for a Fortune 500 company. Even with that very demanding job, he is still active in the arts today. He is a section cello member with me of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, and he works as a part-time audiobook engineer. In fact, he masters all of my audiobook projects for indie authors.

In addition to those art and tech qualifications, Arturo has a Bachelor’s Degree in History. He has always been interested in how the past informs and influences the present and the future, and studying how history rhymes, even when it doesn’t repeat, has always been an area of interest for him. He also, as a layperson, has long been fascinated with the field of futurism, which is the study of exploring predictions and possibilities about the future (see Wikipedia’s article about futurism here), particularly related to future uses of technology.

In short, Arturo’s perspective on the possibilities and potentials that we are facing today in terms of generative AI is informed by a wide variety of experiences: his work as a performing musician, his time in the technology and software engineering space, his study of history as it relates to the present and the future, and his interest in futurism.

Personally, I was really encouraged by what Arturo had to say about how we, as artists, can find ways to navigate the many changes and challenges that AI is most certainly bringing to our creative work processes, and I hope you are encouraged too. Let’s dive into our conversation together.

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Jennifer: Hi, Arturo. Thanks for being here.

Arturo: Thank you. Thank you so much. This is an unusual place for me to be. I'm usually on the other side.

Jennifer: Correct, yeah. Right now you're in my booth with me, which is kind of fun.

Arturo: Yeah. It is.

Jennifer: So the reason that I asked you to do this with me is that this past weekend, we had a conversation while we were taking a walk about AI and how it relates to my work as an audiobook narrator. And our conversation started with us talking about a Reddit article that I had read, where an author who works with audiobook narrators called writers who elect to use AI for their audiobooks, "scabs," which is somewhat of an incendiary comment, and I made the statement that I liked that, and understood where that Reddit writer was coming from. But at the same time, I also wanted to be leery of accepting too readily someone else's opinion just because it agreed with mine. And then at the same time, this is against the backdrop of the Kindle Direct publishing program opening up AI, or text to speech, audiobook narration for their authors. So especially in my particular creative industry, I'm facing a lot of change at the moment, and my creative industry is not the only one that's having that kind of change. So I thought we would start there with this conversation. Share your thoughts.

Arturo: Yeah, sure. I mean, talk about throwing a Molotov cocktail into the discourse about AI, right? I mean, you're right. It is absolutely an incendiary comment, but I can understand where it's coming from. Just from an emotional perspective, facing disruption in your industry is never fun, and it's never easy, and it's always filled with uncertainty. So. Where to begin. I work in technology, as you have mentioned in your introduction, and I have taken a particular interest in both AI specifically, but also in the field known as Futurism in general, which has to do with all things futuristic, for lack of a better term. It specifically has to do with analyzing how technology is bringing us closer to the singularity, which is a topic for a whole other conversation, but have taken a lot of interest in that. As a someone who's passionate about technology and looking at it from the perspective of an industry that is threatening to be disrupted and is it being disrupted, is a very interesting place to be right now.

Jennifer: I would love to know how you see this coming of AI developing specifically in audiobook narration, since that's my creative industry. That's the one you know the most about through my work. Where do you see this going?

Arturo: I mean, talk about the million dollar question, right? So obviously I have opinions about it, some of them informed in some of my reading, some of them just totally because I'm biased and I'm very close to narrators, to many, many narrators, I think. A lot of the discussion that I have heard with regard to the AI has been has been very reactive and has been very, almost regressive. And again, I understand where that's coming from. It is a very threatening thing, just in the abstract, I do think. So, one of the things that we were discussing when we've been talking about this before is sort of the the role that AI is going to have in the industry itself. And we've talked about things as varied as the disruption of farming through technology and the disruption of other industries through technology. Audiobooks are probably going to follow a similar pattern in terms of disruption. So we can talk we can talk about farming since I brought it up.

Jennifer: Let's start there. It's a good analogy I think.

Arturo: I'm a student of history. At least I like to think of myself as a student of history.

Jennifer: You do have a history degree.

Arturo: But in terms of farming specifically, but also just in terms of the Industrial Revolution, farming is something that we have been doing for millennia, since we have been, quote-unquote, "civilized" as a species. We've been doing farming because we've been needing to feed ourselves. And talk about an industry that has been disrupted time and time again. I mean, it seems like every couple hundred years there's a new piece of technology or a new process that totally disrupts the way farming works. We've seen it happen during the Industrial Revolution. We saw it happen through the agricultural revolutions during in antiquity. Most recently, we saw it in the Industrial Revolution, in industrialized farms, in America and in Europe. And so farming is an interesting place to look at because farming is something that will never go away. We are always going to have to get our food from somewhere. I very much doubt, despite what some of the futurists think, that we're going to grow our food in vats all the time, always.

Jennifer: Fully automated.

Arturo: Fully automated food. I mean, we might be able to fully automate food production in the fields. There's this wonderful scene in interstellar, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, where the Matthew McConaughey character automates all of the tractors because he has to. There's a severe population problem in that universe's Earth, and they are needing to produce food regardless because they still need to feed themselves. And so they automate all the tractors. We may see something like that in the future, and it will revolutionize farming. But farming itself is not going away, and there are still people who are going to need farmers around. So that's without getting too down that particular rabbit hole. I see that as an instructive example of where technology has struck, sometimes seemingly fatally, at an industry that has nevertheless persisted.

Jennifer: And I think storytelling is really, really similar in a lot of ways because we've been telling stories longer, actually, than we've been farming. And, you know, the advent of the printing press completely changed the way that stories were told. Troubadours were no longer the sort of modus operandi, the standard modus of storytelling. And yet we still have storytellers. We still have actors. We still have writers. We still have people going around the world telling stories the same way that troubadours did, but yet not the same way, too.

Arturo: And going further than that, you started with a printing press, which is a really, really excellent point. I think if you extrapolate further, the development of theater on stage is not something that we've always had. And so imagine what that would have been like for the traveling storyteller to all of a sudden have this, these massive productions with lots of money that were sort of taking their livelihood away as traveling troubadours and storytellers. All of a sudden people could just they came to them as these giant productions and the troubadours were there, but they maybe weren't as popular. Or with the development of radio drama. I mean, that would have taken a huge bite out of the traditional theater-going culture, I suppose. And yet theater persists. We still go to Playhouse in the park, you and I. Broadway is still going strong, and the West End is still going strong. And little regional theater companies, as far as I know, are still going strong.

Jennifer: They're struggling. But yeah.

Arturo: Yeah. So it does change. I mean, we're not saying that the industry itself doesn't change. It evolves, it becomes something different. I think the jury is out on whether or not these things evolve for the better. It really kind of depends on your point of view and your perspective. TV is another way in which acting has been disrupted. And I think if you talk to your average person on the street, this is kind of the golden age of television. I mean, there's so much choice and there's so much variety and there's so many interesting stories being told. There are some bad ones too. Again, with with quantity comes a large variety of quality. But I don't think anybody can argue that with the advent of television dramas, that theater hasn't evolved into something bigger than it was. Both in terms of access and, in some cases, in terms of quality. Not always. I'm passionate about technology, I firmly believe that while technology is a double edged sword, nuclear weapons being not only the most salient example of that, sure, it is a double edged sword. We derive benefit from it, but we must exercise caution, otherwise we might end up destroying ourselves in the process. So I think that technology, being a double edged sword does mean that it carries with it a certain, well, a very definite benefit. I mean, the whole reason we develop technology is to benefit us. The conversation that we the conversation that we're having about AI and the conversations that I have had personally about AI with other people and other narrators frequently,

Arturo: not always, but frequently, underemphasize the reality that we as a species have created AI and we have created AI for a very specific reason, and that is to eliminate drudgery from our lives. I mean, that's the whole reason we develop technology in the first place. We didn't disrupt agriculture because somebody decided, you know what? This might be an interesting thing to try and fun. Let's try it. When you're starving, you don't have time or the luxury to think of fun, interesting things to try. Somebody needed to increase their yield of a crop that failed the previous three years, and they needed to get rid of famine. And so they came up with iterative methods of improving on their technology. And that's how we've developed AI. I mean, you can trace a line of AI all the way back to developing revolutionary agricultural practices. It's an iterative process, now that we've gotten to this point where we have we're teaching machines how to teach themselves as a species. It's a little frightening if we think about it. But we got here organically. It didn't get plopped into our laps by some alien culture. We came here organically, and so we have to figure out a way to make what we have developed work for us, rather than the other way around.

Jennifer: Sure, there are a lot of really helpful ways that this technology can be used in ways that aren't going to remove the humanity from our art and from our creativity. It's just a matter of making sure that we choose those positive, supportive ways.

Arturo: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things that we mentioned as we've been discussing this is obviously the big question is what is the role of AI in audiobooks specifically?  I need to choose my words very carefully here, because I don't want to turn AI into this thing that has been thrust upon us, because we have developed AI to solve a very specific set of problems, computational problems, but also problems of repetition. I think we need to understand that the skills that humans can offer that overlap with AI are no longer going to be in demand, and I think that's what frightens people. It frightens people because we don't know what we don't know. And it's it's very difficult from this vantage point to try to see what are some of the value adds that we as humans can add? To any industry that is threatening to be disrupted by AI. I am a software developer. At some point, my industry will be disrupted in such a way that it will no longer be necessary or sufficient for me to just be a code monkey. I need to be able to design systems in a way that maybe an AI isn't able to do, or perhaps won't be able to do anytime soon. Sure. So similarly with storytelling, I think. The more human that we can be, the more value add that we can provide to. An audience of human beings because remember, audiobooks are not marketed for computers. Audiobooks are marketed for people. Audiobooks are the way in which wonderfully talented people, who have a lot to offer, can take someone else's story that they have crafted in a way that is, that speaks to their heart so that they might speak to someone else's heart.

Arturo: A narrator can take that story and add their humanness to that tale. And add value to it when it is read to the receiving person. So in other words, there may be a time when I can do something like that. One should never sell technology short. It is amazing what we can accomplish with technology in good and bad ways, but I think from an audiobook narrators perspective, people must -- And not just for audiobooks -- we must all figure out how our humanness can be an asset to the work that we do. So that AI becomes not a replacement of ourselves, but a tool in our arsenal. And really, that's what AI is supposed to be. All of the companies that are taking AI, they are trying to use AI as a tool. They are not deliberately using AI as a replacement for a person. Now, the unfortunate side effect might be that some AI functions replace some human functions, but then it becomes our job. Sort of like the farmer who no longer has to thresh wheat by hand had to figure out some other way to provide value to the process. And I think we all, not just in narration, but throughout industries that are threatened by AI, we all need to figure out how our humanity and what are the things that we as individuals can offer to the industry that AI right now, and perhaps in the foreseeable future, cannot and will not offer.

Jennifer: Sure. So one of the things that we talked about in our conversation that made me want to have this interview with you as a podcast episode, is that in the Reddit article that I mentioned, one of the arguments that the author had is that putting emotion or character voices, either of those two things, into automatically generated audiobooks is something that machines can't do on their own, so it becomes a human responsibility to like, go back and edit the text-to-speech-created audiobook and add these emotions, or add this character voice and that that's just not practical. And his argument was that machines would never be able to do that. And we perhaps had maybe a different perspective on that, that like you said, selling technology short is never a good thing. It is entirely possible that the machines might at some point be able to figure out who's speaking reliably enough to add very good character voices, or figure out the sub-context of the text to be able to add very reliable emotions to that text. And yet that AI is never going to be doing that kind of emotive acting or that kind of character voicing from a human perspective. That is the one thing that AI can never do. And so making sure that in our art, we are infusing it with as much of our humanity and our selves as we can. That's the one thing that AI will never be able to do.

Arturo: I agree with you. I think it's trying to predict technology is a very dangerous game because. We are not really the masters of our own creation at times, and nowhere is that more evident than when it comes to modern contemporary technology, AI specifically.

Jennifer: Because it teaches itself.

Arturo: Because it teaches itself.

Jennifer: So it's not just coming from humans.

Arturo: And so I like to approach the problem as less of "a technology will never be able to do A, B, or C." I like to approach it as more, "I'm going to make the assumption that there will be a day when technology can do some form of A, B, and C. I don't know what that looks like and I don't know when that will happen." As an aside, we humans are terrible, terrible at prognosticating the pace of technology. We frequently underestimate the advances of the technology that we enjoy because we tend to think of things changing linearly.

Jennifer: Sure.

Jennifer: And technology changes on a logarithmic scale.

Arturo: Correct. And this is something that I had to learn from researching and from reading. There's a fascinating book that it's somewhat dated now. It came back out in 2005, I think, by Ray Kurzweil. He's a self-proclaimed futurist and wrote a book called The Singularity Is Near and it's a very, very long, very, very exhaustive look at the pace of technology over the past 100 plus years. And he gets into this very fraught game of predicting where individual technologies are going to be in the next 25, 30 years. And he has been remarkably accurate, uncanny, accurate. It's a little scary. And I think it's simply because he's been able to really grok this idea that technology grows exponentially.

Jennifer: Not on a linear scale.

Arturo: Exactly. So to put it at a very, very basic example, if you need to build a house, you need to find a way to drive small wedges of metal into pieces of wood, right? And so when you invent a hammer, all of a sudden you no longer have just the advances of the nail to help you. You also have the advances of the hammer and the nail working in concert to build something for you. And so all of a sudden, from the hammer and the nail, you've been able to design a chisel, which is just a hammer with a much larger nail. And that is how technology progresses. You end up iterating over the tool set that you've created, and each tool set allows you to develop more advanced tools that much faster. So imagine right now, in an era of self-driving cars and self-landing planes and automatable technology, once technology is able to work with itself to develop things, we are no longer talking about developing developing things on a human scale. And I think, writ large, that can probably feel really, really destabilizing and really scary because all of a sudden we can no longer predict, even at a very imperfect sense, where technology is going to go. So I think from that perspective, it is really dangerous to try to say technology will never do A, B and C.

Arturo: And so that does a couple of things for us. Number one, it takes us out of denial. Number two, by taking us out of denial, it allows us to kind of plan for that, both as a culture and as individuals. So as a culture, we need to be able to plan for a future where we might be able to have technology that is able to emote, maybe not quite in the same way that a human can, but we need to prepare ourselves for a technology that might be able to at least approximate it, so that we can either we can choose to legislate around it, regulate it, or we can choose to change how we think of art so that it becomes not an either-or, but a both-and kind of situation. So to explain, when AI -- and I will say it this way, perhaps inflammatory -- when AI is able to emote human character with some degree of believability, it's going to really commoditize storytelling, which is both good and bad. Now think of think of your favorite food. I'll use coffee as an example, because I am a coffee snob, and anybody who knows me knows that I'm a coffee snob.

Jennifer: Yes, yes you are.

Arturo: Fifty years ago, when Starbucks did not really exist other than as a gleam in Howard Schultz's eye. If you wanted coffee, you got Folgers. And that was it. And nothing against Folgers. It's perfectly adequate as a coffee product. I do not like it. I find that it's got a very chemical flavor that is perfect for the manufacturing process because it is very repeatable, very consistent and very bland. And so when Howard Schultz built Starbucks, he had three purposes in mind. He wanted to make money. Obviously, he wanted to take coffee from this niche drink that only a few people drank, and he wanted to turn that into sort of a cultural phenomenon. And number three, he wanted to bring the concept of the Italian coffeehouse into America and turn it into an American cultural thing. And I think we can all agree he succeeded wildly on all three counts. He commoditized coffee. But when I choose to get my coffee, I do not go to Starbucks. Nothing against Starbucks. They do what they do extremely well. I just don't like it. I want to be able to go to a coffee house, and I want to have a person prepare my puck for me, and I want them to ask me, do you want your shot short? Do you want it longa? How do you want your shot? And I know that they're going to prepare it exactly the way that I want it, even if it takes a little longer.

Arturo: Even if there's a little bit more margin for error. Because there's a lot of margin for error when it comes to espresso, it's a very fussy drink, but I like that about it. I like the variety, I like the imperfection of it, and I like the latte art that they're able to to make. I can't make latte art worth a damn, I really can't. I've tried, and maybe it's the machine, I don't know. And I used to work at Starbucks. So all that to say, I think that AI is going to definitely commoditize storytelling. And I don't see that as a particularly a bad thing, because how many thousands of books are out there that either can't be read visually or will never be read visually, simply because the market of books is very saturated. You go to Amazon.com, and the the most impractical search that you can make on Amazon is the word "book," because it's going to come up with trillions of results. And so no one has the time to narrate that many books. And if we're trying to expand the number of stories that are being told to people, to all people, then we're going to need a way that's a little bit more efficient than just putting a butt in a booth, narrating it, and sticking an engineer in front of it. It's just not a good value proposition for the publishing companies for every single book. That is a fact that's not really an opinion. And so I think we need to prepare ourselves for that kind of world where we can have an entity --

Arturo: I don't like to use the word machine. I've watched too many Terminator movies. I have negative associations with the phrase "the machines" -- when we have an entity or software that is able to take a random book and narrate it, certainly not as well as an Audie winner, maybe not as well as your mid-grade experience level audiobook narrator, but maybe an entry level narrator. For a lot of books, that really is good enough to tell the story. We are never -- I can certainly say that because I've been a human long enough to know humans -- we are never going to eliminate the need for an exquisitely crafted story, narrated artfully and with elegance and with feeling and with emotion. I think that as creatures we know instinctually, somehow I can't explain how, but we know when we are interacting with something that has been generated versus something that is organically created. A person, a human being. We know no one is going to confuse a pet dog with a robot pet dog, at least right now. And even when we are able to fashion android dogs that are as cuddly and maybe cleaner than regular flesh and blood dogs, people are still going to buy dogs or rescue dogs because they are dogs. They're not AI, they're not robots. They're not machines.  I don't think that we'll ever going to take ourselves out of meatspace in that regard.

Jennifer: So just the same way that you're going to choose a hand-pulled espresso shot over Starbucks automated espresso, there is always going to be a market for handcrafted art.

Arturo: That's my opinion, right? I mean, there are no guarantees, and I can't predict the future any more than Ray Kurzweil or anyone else can. But I know myself, and I know that as far as I'm concerned --

Jennifer: You still choose the hand-pulled the espresso.

Arturo: The hand-pulled espresso. I'm not really an alcohol drinker. I like the occasional drink, but I would love to know from someone who frequents bars socially, would you prefer a drink that comes out of a machine, or do you want the experience of interacting with a mixologist at the bar? And that is a very, very personal decision. For some people, it's just, "let's get the alcohol down." But I would imagine that for a lot of people, it's more than the alcohol. It's the experience. And part of the experience is having the conversation with a perfect stranger who's mixing you a beautifully crafted drink.

Jennifer: So when you're interacting with art, some of that interaction is knowing that there's a person behind it and a humanity behind it and and a lived experience behind it, I think.

Arturo: And especially with audiobooks, I think some of the best audiobook narrators are those who are able to bring their life experiences into their craft. Sure, you can tell -- and I'm not saying this as an audiobook expert, really -- I think as a person, you can tell when a story is stilted. When the story maybe doesn't quite fit the narrator's lived experience. Sort of like when you are watching a play or listening to a concert. You can tell if the if the artist's soul is not in it. You can tell. And I think to the extent that we as people can impart our lived experiences into the craft, that is the sort of thing that I can approximate. But probably never duplicate.

Jennifer: Sure. So let's bring this down into the practical a little bit.

Jennifer: Artists, right now across industries -- and yes, we've been talking a lot about audiobooks today, but I hope those of you who are not audiobook narrators have been able to extrapolate our discussion as to how AI might impact your industry. Because, man, the parallels are everywhere. But if you're an artist working today, what do you do to face this coming change? Because it is coming. What are what are some action steps that you think artists can undertake to deal with the way that our creative industries are changing, and are going to change, because of the advent of machine learning?

Arturo: So this is one of those weird situations where "this one weird trick" might actually be really, really helpful. And what that one weird trick is, as it is for most things, it really is about mindset. I think that it is imperative that as artists, all of us and I speak as a cellist, as a composer, we must expand the definition of what our art is. If you are an actor, don't think of the mechanics of acting as your art. Think in more abstract terms, because as soon as you straitjacket yourself into specific actions that that are -- that become -- acting, you are automatically limiting yourself to what you can do. If, as an audiobook narrator, you think of yourself as "I'm going to be narrating YA for such and such a rate, for such and such an audience, for such and such, either for just royalty share or indie authors or publishers." I think the less that you can define your art in terms of actual mechanics and technique, the better. Here's why.

Jennifer: Expand your idea of who you are.

Arturo: Exactly. Because if the people who aren't able to view their art in a more abstract, holistic manner, they're really going to have a hard time adjusting to what happens when AI starts to encroach on those technical aspects of the craft, that you have now defined as your craft in its totality. I think it becomes really, really difficult to see yourself as being able to disrupt the disruptor when you feel like you have nothing to offer in the face of that onslaught.

Jennifer: Sure. So going back to the farming analogy, if you think of yourself as someone who plows furrows in the ground using specific tools and threshes grain using specific tools, when technology advanced and made those specific tools obsolete, and so totally changes the way that farming worked, well, then if if your definition of being a farmer is tied to those tools, then all of a sudden you're not a farmer anymore. But actually you are a farmer because we still need people to grow food. I think that can be expanded to the arts pretty easily. I mean, if I think of myself as an audiobook narrator who works in a specific kind of recording booth with specific equipment and doing specific types of work, then yeah, a lot of that might end up going away. But if I think of myself as a storyteller who collaborates with with written word storytellers to bring it to spoken word, that isn't something that is going to necessarily be changed, even. The method has changed, but not the the actual.

Arturo: Because it becomes a moving target. I think you want to be a moving target, and that's just another way of saying you want to continually improve, you want to continually learn. So as a software engineer, if all I did was transform data structures into code, I would be out of a job very soon, because that sort of paradigm has shifted many, many times in the last 35, 40 years. And it continues to do so, I think. Likewise for audiobooks. If you allow yourself to think of yourself as someone who is involved in the craft of telling stories and change what that means over time, you stand a much better chance of weathering the oncoming storm. Because it is a storm. All of these technology advances, they're coming faster. They are all a storm for human beings. And they are a storm of our own creation, which is the weird thing. But really, if there was just one thing that I could point to is just a mindset shift for people. Because once you've got your mindset conquered, you're kind of halfway there. Then it just becomes a problem of asking the right questions. You're no longer asking, "Can I survive? Is it possible to survive?" But you start asking, "Okay, what sorts of things can I do to add value? How can I modify what I do, or how can I modify how I think of what I do, such that I might be able to fit into the niches that are being created?" I think that it is very tempting to see AI as plugging holes in opportunity, but I think if we do that, we fail to see the niches that are opening up. When the cotton farmers went out of business in, I'll say, the South, because stereotypically that's where cotton is grown, right? Anybody who thought that all they they were was cotton farming went out of business. But the people who realized, hey, you know what? There's this other crop. We'll say, don't no tobacco. I'm not an agriculturalist. I have no idea.

Jennifer: Whatever crops replaced cotton.

Arturo: Insert Crop X, right? If you're able to see yourself as a farmer of crops rather than just as a cotton farmer, then guess what? You have opportunity going forward. The corollary to that is -- So Chile, where I'm from, has a very, very fertile area in the desert that produces natural nitrates, saltpeter. And these were very, very valuable and very much in need in the 19th century. And so Chile fought wars over this arid wasteland because it was valuable. It was very lucrative. Until World War One came. And the Germans developed a synthetic saltpeter that not only replaced naturally made saltpeter, it produced it cheaper, faster, at a better standard to scale, and had the convenient side effect that it allowed Germany to produce weapons for World War One. And so you can imagine what happened to the saltpeter industry in South America. It completely vanished overnight. I am not saying that all those people needed to do was figure out some other way to use saltpeter. Maybe that was an answer for them, but I think that just kind of is indicative of how technology can disrupt an industry into oblivion if you're not careful. And again, I don't think the answer is to suppress the technology. That's not going to happen. I think the answer here is to think of the ways in which technology allows us to provide value that we didn't even know we needed in the past. The example that the writer that you talk about on Reddit gives is not a really a bad one. You know, when you have AI narrating books, yes, it is possible that you might have a need for people who go through and kind of back check and sort of edit their narration. That is an example of a niche that could appear during the advent of narration. But I don't think that's the only one. I think that there are going to be other niches like that, that open up that we don't even know about, because we don't know what we don't know. We are terrible at predicting the future. We really are.

Jennifer: Sure. So going back to some of the practical things to do, something else that you mentioned in what you just said was growth. Make sure that your skills are as good as they possibly can be, that you have the techniques to be able to put your humanity into your art.

Arturo: Yes, and that growth comes from learning new things. It comes from trying new things. It comes from taking some risks, some calculated risks. It comes from interacting with others in your field. And the audiobook industry is a wonderfully unique industry in that it is so collaborative. And so if you're a narrator listening to me right now, you have a wealth of a community at your disposal that you can plumb for ideas, for information, for tips. Use it, use those resources. I think that it is very easy for people to isolate themselves in the face of danger and in the face of threats, and I think that that is exactly the wrong thing to do, particularly within the audiobook industry. It's such a collaborative community. Everyone is in it together. There is very little in terms of competition that I have seen, and so use that to your advantage. Use that for growth. You might end up striking up a conversation with someone you've never met in the narration industry, whether that is a narrator or a producer or an engineer. And you might come up with a niche that you didn't know existed. I don't think we're giving anything away here. You and I had discussed, "What if it were possible for us to use the Amazon Echo to tell stories, you know, could we?" And this isn't my idea. This is something that I heard at a tech conference. What if you could build the next, you know, choose-your-own-adventure using an Amazon Echo? These are the sorts of ideas that come up when you have conversations with other people in your field. And ideas are what we need. We don't want to get stuck. Just consuming whatever I can produce and what I can produce will be considerable and it will be valuable. But we want to make sure that we grow what we can consume.

Jennifer: Sure, human produced things have a different value that is still value.

Arturo: It does. Absolutely. Otherwise, why are we here?

Jennifer: Yeah. So I guess the really big takeaways from this in terms of action items are: adjust your mindset. Expand your concept of who you are in terms of your art so that it's not tied to specific tools and is instead tied to the experience that you create with your art. And tie your identity to that so that your exact tools are maybe a little bit malleable. And then meanwhile, improve your skills with everything you've got. So one of my Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business is ongoing growth. And I'll link to the podcast episode about that, and I also talked about it in last week's podcast episode a fair amount. I'll link to both of those in the show notes, as well as the articles and so forth that we've been referencing in in our conversation today. But in the midst of all of that, really be growing your skills. Make sure that you are always improving, always getting better. And in all of this, kind of like we've been using farming as an analogy all the way through, technology has disrupted farming over and over and over and over and over again. And yet we still have farmers. I think that can be said for art as well. Technology has disrupted the creative industries over and over and over again throughout history, and it's going to keep doing that. And as we've discussed today, it's going to maybe be doing that at a much faster pace, which makes it a little harder to wrap our human brains around that because of the logarithmic scale of technology growth. But disruptions of these kinds have happened for millennia in creative industries. And yet we still have artists. We still have creatives. We still have storytellers. We still have photographers and painters and sculptors. None of our creative industries are going away. They might change what they look like. But our human experience will still be necessary.

Arturo: Yeah. I don't think I could have said it any better than that.

Jennifer: Thank you for joining me today, Arturo. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope that people listening to this both have some practical action steps and maybe a little bit better understanding of what technology looks like from someone who has a unique both technology-and-artist perspective, and historian perspective, and maybe just has a little bit of hope.

Arturo: Thank you. I'm glad that we had this conversation also.

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Thank you so much for being here for this conversation about how artists can navigate the AI-caused changes that are coming to our creative industries. I hope this episode encouraged you that there are ways through this disruptive period, that you have something unique and valuable to offer that cannot be duplicated by artificial intelligence. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please consider leaving me a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Those reviews really do help new people find me! And of course, subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player of choice so that you never miss an episode. If you know a fellow creative who you think might be interested in this episode, or any episode of this podcast, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! And as always, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback for me, or if you have a topic you’d like me to cover in a future episode, you can contact me on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. That’s also where you’ll find everything you need to know about how you can work with me, including how you can attend my free goal-setting workshop in just a few weeks, on December 5, 2023. Please reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you.

And finally, an even bigger shout out of gratitude than usual to my husband, Arturo Araya. He edited and engineered this podcast episode, as he always does, to make sure that the episode sounds good when you listen to it, and he agreed to get behind the mic with me to be interviewed. Thank you, Arturo, for sharing your insight and your skills.

We do know that the existence of generative AI will change how we work as artists, and it might change the kind of work that we are hired to do. But I hope today’s conversation helped you see that, even though those changes might seem really big and scary and impossible right now, they don’t have to be. The world still needs farmers, despite all of the technological change farmers have weathered over the millennia. And the world will still need artists, too, during and after this transition. You bring something unique and special to the world through the art you create, and that priceless je ne sais quoi is what sets you apart from anything AI can or ever will be able to create. If you focus on constantly improving your skills, and if you dig into the delightful humanness that is inherent in who you are and in the art you create, you will find your place in your creative industry, regardless of any changes that might occur due to the presence of AI. AI isn’t human, and you are. Sink into that distinction, and make art with joyful, human abandon. I can’t wait to see what you create.