Is AI Killing Creativity?

You can’t get away from it, it’s spreading like the plague, infiltrating every aspect of our digital lives, whether we want it or not! Sounds like some parasitic virus doesn’t it?! Well, I might be being a little dramatic but the march of AI across the digital landscape is a pretty big deal, especially if you work in the creative industries. From writing to photography, film making to music, AI is everywhere. But is it a good thing? Is it really democratising the arts and making them accessible to all or is it slowly killing creativity?

What is AI?
First off let’s just clarify what we mean when we talk about AI in this particular context – we are not discussing some super artificial intelligence, that AI currently being deployed anywhere and everywhere are language learning models (LLM’s) and they work by feeding off human-made data they access from the web. Nothing is sacred, they crawl the web, scraping data whenever they come across it. They are basically prediction machines, completing a sequence with the most likely answer – learn more here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-ai-works/

So the AI we commonly see being integrated into offices and workplaces is basically a pattern recognition tool, whether that be a piece of music, a video clip, writing or an image – the user inputs a prompt and the AI gives its best/most likely answer. As the technology improves so does the output and it’s definitely getting harder to spot the difference between human-made and AI. But how does this impact creativity? Proponents for the technology say it allows them to be creative by being able to bring their ideas to life. I would argue that has always been the case – just pick up a pencil and draw, an instrument and play or a pen and write- what’s stopping you? The problem is that we want everything at the touch of a button, people don’t want to wait and learn or spend money on employees when they can get a machine to do the job in half the time.

What Can Generative AI Help With?

• Struggling for ideas for new content? LLM’s can give you fresh ideas to help when you’ve got writers block. Remember, it’s all about the ‘prompt’ – be as clear as possible with your wording to gain optimum results!
• Need some design inspiration? AI can help users explore different ideas when trying to come up with a concept or design – take care that the outputs are not infringing on any trademarks or copyright.
• Utilise AI as more of a tool to help enhance our thinking, rather than using to as an alternative to actual human creativity.
• Speed up mundane tasks that would take a person a large amount of time to complete – typical case uses include 3D Visualisers who need to make changes to scenes and environments but don’t have the time needed to complete the tasks by themselves. "I wouldn't have been able to complete this task on time without the help of AI…clients put unrealistic timescales on jobs because they think AI can speed EVERYTHING up.”

Why You Should Use Caution When using AI
Your customers have chosen your brand because they have forged a relationship built on trust – when you start to use generative AI to write content and create images you are risking breaking that trust if you are not diligent. It’s imperative that you carefully proof all content before you post it – the software you use produces images and text derived from a massive pool from the web and even if you feed it your own data there is still a risk it will mislead or hallucinate. We see badly thought out content rushed out all the time, often as a result of using generative AI l – this Christmas ad recently made the news : https://archive.ph/USngO

Copyright issues aside (well, the big tech companies seem to think they don’t apply to them anyway) there are other issues that arise when we use AI for creating imagery, text and music. Is it really creative to type a prompt into a machine for it to spit out an image or piece of music which is basically just a bit of a rehash of preexisting works that the AI has been trained on? Personally, I don’t think so, although I know many people who find LLM’s really helpful at drafting pieces of writing or coming up with ideas for art and design. On hearing that people are using AI to write emails or letters I was pretty baffled – is it really that hard to write a sincere email or letter? I understand that life is hectic and that we are constantly looking for ways to save time, especially on mundane tasks.

The thing is, for most creatives, their jobs are far from mundane and AI is solving a problem that was never there. In the past we dreamed of a future where robots would do the boring stuff like cleaning or ironing, or the less popular jobs like refuse collection. We were promised a utopia where we could live out our lives creating art and music but it seems the opposite is being shoved down our throats. Instead of fostering a lifelong love of learning and creating we are watching as the world becomes reliant on technology to do the thinking and creating for us. We are getting to a point where homework is being completed by AI and university degrees are accomplished because of ChatGPT – a dumbing down of the population. That sounds pretty scary to me!

Written by Louise Lockhart Digital Sorceress & Global Head of Crayons at Creative Remedy.