AI itself isn’t the problem, it’s the lure it offers to those inclined to cheat - David Behrens

I know what you’re thinking: there’s an electricity company that replies to its customers?

Octopus said the computer algorithms it was using to deal with questions achieved a higher satisfaction rating than his real workers had ever managed. The claim set off panic that artificial intelligence would upend the jobs market if not reined in. The computer maker IBM concurred; nearly 8,000 of its own staff might have to be sacrificed in the next five years, it warned.

The danger is more fundamental still. AI is about blurring the distinction between what is real and what is not. It can produce art and literature as casually as it can toss off an electricity bill. It could make genuine creativity an expensive luxury.

They are already discovering this in Bradford, where next month’s annual literature festival has been derailed by a partial boycott over a brochure that contains AI illustrations.

Chris Mould, one of the local artists due to take part, said the images undermined the very nature of the event, which was to instil a love for the creative arts; not circumvent them. Emma Reynolds, a children’s illustrator, wondered why the organisers had not hired an artist in the first place. If an arts festival would not promote creativity, who would?

Finally, the Society of Authors intervened, urging the festival to replace the AI illustrations with credited work by a human artist.

The disingenuous response from the organisers was to throw their design agency under the bus. “They could and should have been more explicit about the use of AI tools and the potential issues,” said the Bradford artistic director.

But a design agency does not have final say. The festival itself must have signed off the artwork and in a city that is to be Britain’s capital of culture the year after next, its behaviour is a worrying misstep. You can’t promote the arts by denying work to artists.

This is not to say that writing computer code that makes AI possible is not creative in itself. However, the same could be said about the work of Dr Frankenstein – a point made rather eloquently last week by Geoffrey Hinton, the Google scientist they called the ‘Godfather of AI’, when he resigned to draw attention to the monster he had helped create.

Hinton reminds us – as did Mary Shelley – that no matter how sound the ideology, there will always be those who seek to subvert it. Scams will be harder to spot; falsehoods made indistinguishable from facts. Humanity has an endless capacity to reduce everything to its level.

It need not be this way. If you want to see how automation can enhance creativity rather than replace it, look no further than tonight’s Eurovision Song contest from Liverpool, where banks of computers control the camera cranes and switch between shots faster and more accurately than a human ever could.

This is artificial intelligence of a kind – as is all software – but it’s there to make the event more exciting, not more artificial. Behrens junior was in the audience for one of the semi-finals and reported that the synchronicity of the people running the technology was a show in itself.

Liverpool knows a bit about showmanship; it was the capital of culture for all of Europe 15 years ago and is still enjoying the creative and financial legacy, Bradford should be learning from it, not getting bogged down in arguments over ethics.

In any case, it’s not AI itself that’s the problem – it’s the lure it offers to those inclined to cheat. Criminals will exploit it to deceive; businesses to cut costs; unmotivated students to skive off their homework.

The more creatively inclined, on the other hand, will use it to mine new avenues of opportunity, as they did with earlier innovations like Photoshop and synthesised music.

That’s why it’s disappointing to see a cultural festival setting the wrong tone, succumbing to the temptations and seeming to not understand why people get cross. That they will have done this unconsciously is half the problem.

In time, there will be rules to govern the use of AI; labels to explain where and why it has been deployed. Publishers will have to set boundaries to help us navigate the new landscape more confidently. And that’s the point at which our natural intelligence might finally put all this artificiality into perspective.