Earlier this week, I asked whether AI could be something we use just for fun.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately creating characters, making animations, playing with voices, and inventing little stories. Some of them are rather silly, and I wouldn’t want them any other way.
I’m enjoying myself.
But as often happens when I start thinking about something, another question appeared.
What are the risks of playing with AI?
I don’t mean that we should be suspicious of everything we enjoy. I’ve spent much of my life exploring technology, often without having any particular purpose in mind. Curiosity has always been a good enough reason for me to try something.
Still, AI brings a few questions into the picture that I don’t remember having quite the same way with other creative tools.
Who is actually being creative?
When I create something with AI, I usually have an idea of what I want. Sometimes it’s quite specific. Other times I start with something vague and discover the direction as I go along.
The AI suggests things. I accept some, reject others, change my mind, and occasionally end up somewhere I hadn’t expected.
One example of this is Sven, an AI voice I created some time ago. He writes rather sarcastic posts for my Critically Curious blog, and sometimes something he writes gives me an idea I hadn’t thought of myself.
Recently, he wrote a post questioning why we seem to call almost everything AI these days. I was reading it when I suddenly realized there was a much bigger question hiding in all that sarcasm. That became the starting point for a video on my Creator in the Loop channel.
I hadn’t asked Sven to come up with a video idea. I wasn’t even looking for one. But something in his writing made me stop and think.
So whose idea was it?
Sven’s post gave me the spark, but I was the one who recognized something worth exploring and decided what to do with it.
And I rather like that kind of creative collaboration.
I enjoy that process.
But I wonder what happens when it becomes easier to accept whatever appears on the screen than to spend time developing my own ideas.
There’s a difference between being surprised by a suggestion and simply letting the suggestions make all the decisions.
I don’t think there’s a clear line that applies to everyone. Sometimes I want to be deeply involved in every detail. Other times I’m perfectly happy to let the technology surprise me.
Perhaps the interesting part is noticing when I’m making that choice.
When a character starts feeling familiar
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most is creating AI characters.
I give them personalities, appearances, voices, and sometimes rather elaborate fictional lives.
And after spending enough time working with a character, something interesting happens. The character becomes familiar.
I know how I expect it to speak. I recognize its expressions. I can imagine how it might react to a situation.
Of course, I know that the character isn’t a living being. I’m the one creating the personality and deciding what belongs in its fictional world.
But humans have always formed connections with fictional characters. We get attached to people in books, movies, and television shows.
Does something change when we’re also the ones creating those characters, and AI allows us to interact with them?
I find that question fascinating.
There is a difference between enjoying a fictional personality and forgetting what is behind it. I wonder how easily that distinction might become blurred, especially as these characters become more convincing.
The things we don’t see while we’re having fun
Then there are the questions that exist outside the creative process itself.
What happens to the information we share with AI tools? What about copyright and the material used to develop these systems? And how much energy and other resources are required to generate all the images, videos, and ideas we’re playing with?
These questions don’t disappear because we’re doing something enjoyable.
I also wonder how much of the technology we really understand when the experience is designed to feel effortless.
We type something, click a button, and an image or animation appears. Sometimes the result is astonishing. Sometimes it’s ridiculous. Either way, it’s easy to focus entirely on what just appeared on the screen.
I certainly do that myself.
And perhaps that’s part of what makes AI so appealing. It removes a lot of the technical barriers between having an idea and seeing something resembling that idea.
But the systems behind that simple interaction are anything but simple.
Does knowing more change the fun?
This is where I keep coming back to my own relationship with technology.
I remember exploring the early internet, when much of what we were doing was driven by curiosity. We wanted to see what was possible, communicate in new ways, and discover things we hadn’t encountered before.
We certainly didn’t understand all the consequences of what we were creating and adopting.
Looking back, I can see both the wonderful possibilities and some things we might have approached differently.
I wonder whether we’re in a similar position with AI today.
I don’t want to lose the pleasure of exploring something new simply because I know there are complicated questions surrounding it.
At the same time, I don’t want my enjoyment to become an excuse for ignoring those questions.
Maybe both can exist together.
I can spend an evening making a ridiculous animated character do something completely unnecessary, laugh at the results, and still be curious about the technology that made it possible.
And perhaps sometimes that curiosity will lead me to change how I use it.
I don’t know exactly where those boundaries are for me yet. I suspect they’ll continue to shift as I learn more.
For now, I’m going to keep playing, creating, and asking questions.
But I’m curious about something. Does knowing more about the risks of AI change how much you enjoy using it, or can you separate the fun from the concerns?
