For anyone within the creative space within the past three years, artificial intelligence (AI) has seemed like an unstoppable bogeyman. There have been endless predictions that AI will replace artists, automate ideating, or otherwise kill creativity.
As someone who has been following this story for those three years, I honestly wonder how true it really is. Are art and creativity, things that have existed as long as humanity itself, really about to disappear? I do not think so, and after hearing why, you may be a little more hopeful about the future too.
AI does not fit with creativity
The marketing of AI talks of it “boosting productivity”, “streamlining schedules”, and “supercharging workflows”. These are all very economic terms describing work output, and maybe surprisingly, do not deal much with creativity at all. Despite the omnipresence of chatbots and large language models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta AI, and the endless slew of AI products being churned out, most of the technology’s serious applications have been in very specific fields. Like any computer program, AI has been most successful in fields involving predictive models, data analysis, pattern recognition, and other highly repetitive and structured tasks.
If you looked at the consumer advertisements for AI however, you definitely would get undertones of them being creative replacements. They say to use AI to write emails, create schedules, or even generate websites or entire books for you. AI is often called a tool, but no tool in history is able to create end products this easily. Every new tech product has an AI assistant that is seemingly able to do anything you want. Crucially though, while the development processes of tech and art are changing, the economics are not.
AI cannot easily kill creativity because it and economics have never played nice, with many great artists infamously dying penniless. Even in today’s economy of film studio and book publishing mega-conglomerates, every new release is a gamble. Artists work in their respective careers for the love of the process, as making money this way is simply hard. AI aims to make making money easier, meaning it uses a fundamentally different thought process. But if that is true, why is everyone acting like it is not?
AI, economics, and limitations
Most of AI’s “creative” applications are office tasks like writing emails, drafting schedules, simple graphic design, and creating websites. These tasks are not purely mechanical, but still can be relatively easily boiled down into structured processes that AI can follow. There very much is a function-over-form approach at play here, with creative flare not really being a priority. AI can deliver a product of adequate quality for cheap, and that is all the office space often needs. Even then though, studies caution against excessive AI use since it leads to repetitive ideas.
Even with this cynical perspective, novelty and originality (even if it does not truly exist) are highly valuable to any industry. AI cannot kill creativity because it is not creative itself, only answering prompts using predictions based on its training data. AI cannot look at problems conceptually or in a vacuum, a process that usually gives novel results. This is also why AI often fails at tasks relying on reactions or improvisation, as it cannot think past its training data.
Like anything in economics, there are tons of advertisements for AI simply because it is the current trend. Just like sports, cars, and social media, AI companies would love if you based your life around their products. The technology does not yet have a path to long-term profitability, so companies are putting it in everything and seeing what sticks. AI will not die, but rather after the hype dies down it will shrink into the spaces it is useful in. I imagine it will remain common in low-cost creative spaces like social media and simple advertising, but more traditional creative industries that thrive on novelty cannot make such compromises.
Something always HAS been killing creativity
The creative industry is unique in how it is much less dominated by convenience and user efficiency. Digital cameras did not kill analogue cameras, which themselves did not kill painting. Theater and concerts are still popular despite the accessibility of high-quality recording and playback equipment. Even in the tech space, physical media is making a bit of a comeback in the current streaming era. No matter the convenience of the modern, there always is a part of us all that appreciates the authentic. Audiences have shown that they do not want to pay for AI-generated products, which single-handedly keeps it from killing creativity.
AI-generated material is technically impressive, but it lacks that human connection so important to art. AI models are notoriously opaque in how they operate, with prompt writing being comparable to repeatedly spinning the lottery until it lands on a result you like. When the only human part of a work is the prompt it was generated from, it is not apparent how much passion was put in it compared to a fully-human work. This is fine for some simple social media stimulation, but again, audiences are proving unwilling to pay for this. AI art will certainly continue to have an audience, but to say other art will die out is to ignore history.
Something always WILL be killing creativity
Art is a field where in innumerable amount of technologies and styles can exist in relative harmony. Looking just at films, they can be live action, hand-drawn animation, stop-motion animation, animatronics or puppets, computer animation, or hybrids. There also is analog film, digital, 3D, 4D and Smell-o-Vision, multi-screen, and many different aspect ratios. All of these have fluctuated in prevalence depending on cultural trends and novelty, but none fully died out when something new was introduced. These formats also share a lot of talent, all needing directors, screenwriters, costume and set designers, (voice) actors, and more.
The responsibilities of professional artistic roles like this change depending on the available technology, but little have died out completely. I find there is little reason to think AI will kill these sorts of creativity, and the same to whatever comes after AI. Artists just have to be adaptable, which is nothing new and should not be surprising advice, as it is true for any industry. It is more important than ever that we hone and display our creative voice, as it makes us special.
What does the future hold?
A lot of us are wishing for AI to die or for us to go back to five years ago. Obviously neither of these are going to happen, but like art, the economy is not completely doomed either. Entry level jobs are hard to get right now, but companies will open them back up lest they give up future talent. Current political turbulence is also affecting the job market, which similarly will not go on forever. A lot of us Gen Z may have to get unflattering jobs until things settle out, but they always do, plus we can still develop soft skills that will carry over to our dream careers.
Similarly, the current ‘AI bubble’ probably will not cause the economic fallout that many are predicting. Many have compared the situation to the 2000s dot com bubble, but I think that is an exaggeration. That bubble was driven by startups running only on hype, while this one is driven by corporations that will still exist and be highly profitable afterward. Startups will come and go, but the technology has already proven itself to have long-term potential. Things are not going to back to before, but hopefully I have shown that this is normal and okay.
