AI vs Humans

hether it's Ghibli style or Disney Pixar style, whether it's sketching or painting, today, AI can create all kinds of art. Within just a few seconds, AI can create songs using Mohd Rafi's voice, can write screenplays for films, can write dialogues for films. In such a situation, the question arises, Is AI the end of artists? Is there any place left for human creativity? Bollywood's copycat artists, who have only copied and pasted films and songs, have now become the inferior version of AI. But what about the millions of independent artists what why they do? Many decades ago, Osho called the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti the most intelligent man of the 20th century. When he died in 1986, he said that such sharpness and intelligence can hardly be found ever again for centuries. If you have never heard of Jiddu Krishnamurthy, then going by Osho's statement alone, you can imagine that he would be a philosopher whose way of thinking would be completely different, whose thoughts must have been strikingly original. But your assumption would come crashing down, when you hear Jiddu Krishnamurti repeatedly talking about the conditioning of the mind. "Our brains are conditioned." "Whatever is conditioned is limited." How our minds have been conditioned since childhood. Our thoughts are not ours. And that's why Krishnamurti showed the means for liberation. Our non-judgmental observation. This thought raises a very important question. Can there be any totally original ideas? Famous American writer Mark Twain had said it very clearly. That no idea is new. There is no such thing as a new idea. In his opinion, most of the human innovations, the new things that we think of, are always made up of older, existing ideas, their permutations and combinations. He compared this creative process to a mental kaleidoscope. You know a kaleidoscope, right? A device like this. In it, you can see colourful patterns because of the beads. He said that the creative process is a mental kaleidoscope, where the old ideas are like the old colourful beads, which can be shaken to make new and curious combinations. Today, many people downplay the technology of artificial intelligence by saying that AI can't think originally. But according to Jiddu Krishnamurthy and Mark Twain, the question arises can humans think original? Those of you who have no idea about AI, let me tell you, how the AI technology works fundamentally. A large amount of data is fed into it. Like ChatGPT was fed numerous books, research papers, and as much knowledge as available on the internet, everything was fed in the form of data. And AI analyses and processes that data and learns from it. Recognising different patterns, learning human languages, and learning different art styles. And then, when you ask AI, it imitates this knowledge, to gives you the answer. For example, if Rabindranath Tagore's poems are fed into AI, it assesses Tagore's style. Which words are used? What are the patterns? What kind of language is being used? And the next time you ask AI through a prompt to write a poem in Rabindranath Tagore's style on hair fall, within a few seconds, AI will generate a poem for you. The same thing can be done with all the poets in the world. Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, and William Blake. But not only poems, AI can even make art for you. The Ghibli trend has been so popular over the last few months. Using ChatGPT and Grok, you must have already generated your photos in Ghibli style. Or you must have at least seen it on social media. Such images. How is AI able to do this? Using the same process. Studio Ghibli's films were fed as input into AI as data. AI analysed their style and then superimposed that style on your picture. This is possible for songs, too. It was only because of AI that we can hear this song from the film Dunki, in Mohd Rafi's voice. The flag bearers of human creativity will say, this isn't art. This is just copying someone else's style, not real art. But just think about it, when art is created by humans, when people learn to create art, in art schools, what happens then? When we do a course on English honours or Hindi honours in college, we are taught Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, William Blake, Kafka, Mahadevi Verma, Vinod Kumar Shukla, and Nagarjuna. And many such famous writers' literature is taught. What is the curriculum of the Bachelor of Fine Arts course? Great painters like Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo, Tayyab Mehta, Amrita Shergill. Studying their arts. Studying different schools of painting like Mughal style, Rajasthani miniature style, Warli style, and Madhubani. If you attend a film school, you are shown masterpieces of world cinema. Satyajit Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky. These styles are then analysed by the students. Just like data is fed into AI, the art schools feed data to humans. And often, these artists are proud when they talk about their art projects in the shadow of these legendary artists. With a philosophical outlook, they say such things. "Wong Kar Wai's film, In the Mood for Love, its look and feel was my inspiration for this scene." When someone sees their paintings in an exhibition and guesses that their artwork shows that their favourite painter is Paul Szyża. The artist becomes overjoyed. They agree to it, and say things like Szyża has had a big subconscious influence on their art. But when, within a few seconds, AI makes a Szyża-style painting, then people call this art an insult. An insult to life. Now this is like, your dog is just a dog, but mine is precious. If I do it, it's an inspiration, but if AI does it, it's an imitation. Like one of the most famous art house filmmakers in India, Mani Kaul. When you see his film, you realise that he had Robert Bresson in mind. He has admitted to this that when he watched Robert Bresson's film Pickpocket while studying in FTII Pune, It was like a revelation for him. Such art-house filmmakers are still okay. They call it inspiration. But commercial films are too much. They copy it directly. Most of Aamir Khan's films are good. I enjoy them. But do you know how many of his films are inspired by Hollywood films? It was clearly mentioned about Laal Singh Chaddha that it was the official remake of Forrest Gump. Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikandar copied Breaking Away (1979). Baaji copied Die Hard (1988). Aatank Hi Aatank copied The Godfather (1972). Mann copied An Affair To Remember (1957). Fanaa copied Eye Of The Needle (1981). Ghajini copied Memento (2000). Dhoom 3 was a mix of The Prestige (2006) and The Dark Knight (2008). It's not just Aamir Khan. Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Sanjay Dutt, Ajay Devgn, Amitabh Bachchan, take the films of any Bollywood star, some films have copied a story, some copy scenes or action, from Hollywood, Tamil or Telugu films. Take super-hit Telugu director Rajamouli. Many of his films are inspired by other films. From RD Burman to Anu Malik and Pritam, they've copied the music. Search on YouTube to see which are the copied Bollywood songs. And you will get a long list of videos. You will be surprised to see that more than half of the older songs you like were copied. But when it comes to copying or imitating, no one can compete with AI. Because the data captured by human brain by watching movies and listening to songs, that's not even a fraction of the amount of the data fed into AI. On top of that, in terms of the speed of work, humans cannot match AI. Within a few seconds of giving the prompt, you will get an entire song. That's why such copycat artists are now the inferior version of AI. And because of this, AI has become a useful tool in many day-to-day tasks. Especially the monotonous and repetitive tasks. If you want to learn more about this, then come and join my AI Masterclass. A 3-hour workshop where I teach you to use more than 25 AI tools live. Here, you'll learn how to use AI to generate hyper-realistic photos and videos. Using AI to build websites. Using AI to make presentations. Using AI to do research. You will be taught about many new things in a short amount of time. This is the fastest and most affordable way to upskill yourself in AI. It costs as much as two movie tickets. If you are interested, you can find the link in the description below. You can go join it quickly because it is available only for a limited time. Now, let's get back to the topic. Look, I'm not saying that it's wrong to take inspiration from other films and art. I'm not criticising it. But if someone is copying things without thinking, without giving it any original thought, it becomes wrong. But a problem ten times bigger than this is the formula films of the film factories. The mainstream 'masala' Tamil or Telugu films, it feels like all of them are made by the same director. Not only are the stories and characters the same, but there is now a template for images and camera angles too. The way the hero will enter. The sound effects for the villain's entry. If someone is injured and has to be taken to the hospital, the ambulance arrives in the exact same way. The patient is taken through the hospital corridor on a stretcher. These hackneyed images have been shown on screen so many times that it has become boring. Ekta Kapoor's TV serials are at the topmost level of factory films. Where the director just gives directions like a factory's shop floor manager. That's why many of these TV serials that have been on our TVs over the last decade, you wouldn't know the name of the director of any of these TV serials. For a long time, people have been discussing how Bollywood's larger- than-life circuses are failing. But Hollywood isn't faring any better either. There are similar criticisms too. That Hollywood's soul is dead. For the screening the film scripts, there are no creative people in the production houses. They hire MBA grads. They do not want to risk trying anything new. They want to do what has worked before. Once the Mirzapur series was a hit, they kept making shows like Mirzapur. And just like that, there's a flood of crime series. There are so many remixes of older hit songs. Hollywood and Bollywood both are now flooded with sequels and remakes. Even if a sequel has nothing to do with the first part, it is still titled a sequel to the hit film. Greedy film corporations are now competing with McDonald's and KFC in terms of standardising recipes. It doesn't matter if a McDonald's burger is made by a robot or a human. Similarly, the various tasks that go into making a film now it doesn't matter if they're done by a human or AI. If they want to make such factory formula films only, it will be difficult for humans to compete with AI. Earlier, in a film production office, 10 people would look for older super-hit Hollywood films. Like Buster Cretton's Our Hospitality. So that it can be remade as Maryada Ramanna and Son of Sardar. But AI already has the stories and box office figures for thousands of films. The MBA grads who spent days reading 40-page scripts or pitch decks, AI can read through them in a few seconds. Not only that, AI can go one step further than humans. The character arc of the characters in the film, the plot twists, the plot tension, it can optimise those by analysing the target segments and different parameters. Not only does it work faster, more reliably, but it can work more and give better results. In Hollywood, the writers have already gone on strike because of this. Because AI is being used for scriptwriting. There's AI software to make storyboards too. Think about it, if AI analysed Studio Ghibli's films, to make Ghibli-style images, can't it make Bollywood Masala-style images too? It definitely can. Studio Ghibli's films showcase next-level creativity. But for these factory films, as I said, all of them look the same. So, from writing dialogues to short selection, for AI, these tasks, won't be difficult at all. If you don't believe me, I'll show you a live example. I wrote this prompt for ChatGPT, "Create an image of Shahrukh Khan as a Telugu actor fighting with goons." And AI designed this amazing picture. Then I told ChatGPT to "Create 10 original masala-style one-line dialogues that Salman Khan would typically say in an action movie to a villain." And look at the response! It gave me better one-liner dialogues than actual Bollywood films have. "You have seen only my action, the reaction is yet to come." "In my dictionary, Mercy is the name of the hospital." "Make mistakes in life, but only once in front of me." "Don't try to explain it to me, because you are guaranteed to fail in the exam." Here I can make these dialogues rhyme so that they sound spicier. "As long as my entry is powerful, you're guaranteed to have a bad time." "I am a wild lion, I hunt in the open field, not in a cage." "I won't shoot you with bullets, but with emotions." "It will hurt, and you will remember it." I am wondering what will happen to formula filmmakers like Rohit Shetty. Like Ekta Kapoor's serials, will they too be merely there to say 'Action' and 'Cut?' During the production of such films, editing interns used to be hired to trim the action and cut ends of the footage. Removing the NG that is the Not Good shots, and assembling the timeline using the final takes. For such mechanical tasks, there are AI extensions in editing software. But since we are talking about factory films, here, even the main editor's work has become mechanical. Adding a cut in every few seconds, showing everything in slow motion from different angles, that's why even the editors are afraid of being replaced. This isn't a future event. Even today, editors and animators feel that their jobs are in danger because of AI. The extras in movies, can also be replaced by AI-created digital replicas. The thing is, in these film factories, every worker was just a small cog in the big machinery. And it's easy to replace them. And for these big corporations, it's difficult to escape this temptation. They'll think of cutting costs, removing these people to increase their profits. But the question here is, didn't this happen before? When bakers, carpenters, ironsmiths, and handloom weavers were replaced by machines. Machines entered their lives like a monster and stole their bread. This happened during Mahatma Gandhi's era. Then, Gandhi said that he was not against machines. But machines can't be left unchecked to create unemployment. Since then, there have been many such changes due to technology. The camera replaced the sketch artist. The mobile phone cameras replaced the photographers. Thousands of accountants and bookkeepers were replaced by computers. As software became more complex, it kept replacing more and more people. And today, the IT sector is a known bloodbath with recurring layoffs. Industrial robots are replacing assembly line workers too. Robot cleaners have entered the homes, which are poised to replace house workers. Screens are here to replace waiters in restaurants. You can order your food yourself through them. Customer care representatives are being replaced by AI chatbots. Even beyond this, we witnessed the AI avatar of news anchor Anjana Om Kashyap. It looked the same, sounded the same, with nearly the same gestures. "The Anjana you are seeing in the studio is my AI avatar." Anjana may not be replaced, but her AI Avatar can surely take away someone else's job opportunity. Even in the film world, musicians who play live music were replaced by programmed music. Stunt performers were replaced by VFX. Friends, broadly speaking, any and everything that can be replaced, will be replaced by these capitalist corporations. Because it is their declared objective to maximise profits. In a capitalist sense, what is the sole purpose behind creating a company? Let's look it up on the internet. The first answer is Profitability. So let's clarify one thing here. This isn't a fight between AI and humans. The actual struggle here is between corporations and individual artists. Will there be any government regulations to stop this? It seems difficult. Because, globally, the governments are the stooges behind these corporations. This is the reason behind the increasing unemployment and wealth inequality. Since it's not possible to stop this change, the question arises that will AI end the jobs of all artists forever? In this AI-era, does human creativity have no place? Friends, that's not true. It's not true because humans have something that AI doesn't have. Personal experience. In this video, I talked a lot about films. So let's try to understand this using films as examples. Let's take Anurag Kashyap as an example. His every film feels like a personally felt project. No Smoking, is a trippy psycho-thriller film. In it, he expressed his anger towards the censor board through a metaphor. At one point, Anurag Kashyap was an alcoholic. He hadn't met his daughter for a year. To reconnect with his daughter, he made an animation film like Return of Hanuman. He made Gulal, a political drama thriller. He made Gangs of Wasseypur. A gangster film, in which both parts were created together. And despite the success of the film, he said that there won't be a third part. Because as an artist, he yearns to try new things. Some of his films have flopped too. But he didn't fear it and stop experimenting. Like Ugly, a heart-touching mystery thriller. Or his most underrated film, Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat, a romantic drama, which was a reaction to today's socio-political circumstances. That in our society, even now, there are so many enemies of love. Devdas is an old story, there are about 10-12 films on it already. But when he took it and made Dev D, his perspective was clearly visible in it. Anurag's films reflect a worldview. He looks at the violence in the society, and chooses dark subjects, because people aren't ready to confront such emotions in real life. But he is not nihilistic or hopeless about it. In fact, his films reflect a strong feeling of empathy. Sure, there are some exceptions that can be ignored, like Gangs of Wasseypur 2, but here, his filmography makes him an irreplaceable artist. An artist who cannot possibly be replaced by AI because AI cannot understand his personal experiences. Another such filmmaker is Dibakar Banerjee, his films don't follow any set formula. There's no doubt that he is the most versatile filmmaker in Bollywood. Khosla ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, Shanghai, each of his films is a gem. He faces no threat from any AI. He needs to be wary of only the film corporations. Because they want to push away independent voices like him out of not only cinema halls but also OTT. Maybe he should move to Kerala, where independent thought in films is still alive. Fahadh Faasil's films like Kumbalangi Nights, Trance, Aavesham, these are reaching the cinephiles throughout the country. No director, writer, or editor of such films is worried about being replaced by AI because their work is driven by their experiences and creativity. It's not like they aren't inspired by other films. They are, but that inspiration is only an inspiration in the truest sense. Like Anurag Kashyap watched films like Om Darbadar. He was inspired by it and the songs of that film, Meri Jaan, AAA, BBB, CCC's style, can be seen in Dev D's song Emotional Atyachar. Quentin Tarantino has said that he was very influenced by Sergio Leone. "The one artist that I think is the most influential to me," "in my work," "it's gotta be Sergio Leone." "That kind of half-assed, operatic quality" "that he brought" "in a way the music takes over and kind of set pieces." "Directing via set piece a lot of times." "I think he is the filmmaker that you can spot the most in my work." That's why there's nothing wrong with going to film schools. But it shouldn't be that film school presents legendary filmmakers like gods in front of you. And you get overwhelmed by their greatness. The purpose of going to film school and watching world cinema should be to watch all kinds of films. From David Lynch's dreamlike, absurdist, psychedelic movies to Béla Tarr's deeply meditative, lyrical films. Watch fast-paced, thought-provoking films like Fight Club and slow-paced, cathartic films like Melancholia. And instead of binding you, these films should liberate you. Instead of imitating someone, you get inspired by them. To do something artistic. To develop your own style. And it's not just about films. Go out and observe the world. See as many things as you can. And then make a juice out of it and take the nutrition from it. Because AI can capture a lot of data and information. But only humans can get immersed in an experience. And because of those experiences, the creation that comes from within us, this creative process is possible only with humans. The poster boy of American independent cinema, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, he shared a similar piece of advice. He too believes that nothing is truly original. And tells others to steal from anywhere that inspires them, or fuels their imagination. Older movies, newer movies, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, our dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, lakes and rivers, lights and shadows. Let yourself absorb everything. Steal only those elements that speak directly to your soul. He says that if you do this, your work will be authentic and people will love you for your authenticity. And as long as you hold on to your authenticity, then I think that there's nothing wrong with using AI. Because by doing this, AI is not replacing your creativity. It is just a tool. Just like a calculator is a tool, a computer is a tool, a smartphone is a tool. Before the invention of computers and tablets, artists used to draw everything with their hands. The artists who adopted these new tools now paint with tablets. But this didn't replace their creativity. They just found a different way to work. When big corporations are using AI for cost-cutting, then why shouldn't an individual artist use it to better express his creativity? Here, AI gives us a huge advantage that isn't recognised by most people yet. Not only is AI making things easier for big companies, but is also making things easier for individuals. It is dramatically reducing costs. Suppose you write a book for kids, but you don't have the funds to have illustrations done for it. Now, with AI, you can do this yourself. If you want to make a short film, but you can't find good stories in the public domain, you can ask AI to find something. Compared to Google search, AI saves much more time. The work which required teams of hundreds of people, now with AI, an individual can make entire animation films alone, can make computer games. AI is empowering individual artists, to compete with big corporations. So from the perspective of an artist, don't keep trying to protect your mechanical jobs in these corporate factories. Use these tools to become an enterprising artist. This is why today, learning how to use these AI tools is becoming a necessity.