Let's talk about creativity & A.I.
The rise of AI may be a threat to creatives; so how do we maintain a sense of true self-expression outside of it?
I keep thinking of that viral tweet that says: “can we get some A.I. to pick plastic out of the ocean or do all the robots need to be screenwriters?”
A recurring question came up at both books events I did at Henley and Cheltenham Literature Festivals last year. We were talking about books, creativity and growing your own business on stage and multiple people clutched the mic tightly, asking: “As a creative person, are you worried about AI?”
There is an overarching fear bubbling away and it makes sense to stay alert and sceptical. If an AI machine can write a novel — for example — and have perfect grammar, generate ideas faster, scan the whole web before you’ve had your morning coffee, then what will become of writers (or insert-any-profession-here)? This is the current fear.
Authors such as George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 big-name authors who have recently filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI. Many authors I personally know are confused at finding out their books are included in a data set of more than 191,000 books (currently being used without permission) to train AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. (Not to mention that millions of workers who are apparently being paid very badly by corporations to do this kind of work.)
Between the years of 2011-2015 “self-driving cars” was on every digital agency “future trends” report. It became a joke. Got a spare slide on your client deck? Put self-driving car on there. I've not yet laid eyes on one.
Things are on the way, but most of the time we are surrounded by gimmicks and headlines. For example, Mark Zuckerberg recently unveiled a collection of various ”AI chatbots” starting with famous faces such as Kendall Jenner and Paris Hilton — having apparently bought their likeness for top money (paying a purported $5 million for a mere 6 hours of real-life work). It’s just not that interesting to me, AI trickery making famous people getting more famous. I’m more interested in how it actually assists and helps people in everyday life.
Marketing genius Seth Godin believes that AI will only come for ‘mediocre jobs’, like your average middle-manager, sub-par accountant with no real differentiating qualities or as harsh as it sounds: the not-very-good writer. He believes that this is an opportunity for humans to level up. AI can take the repetitive boring stuff, and humans could have more time to think and dream and make and improve. Comedian Bill Bailey also thinks artists will have to up their game, being 'more eccentric, more original' and 'more personal' in order to compete against AI.
Personally I believe human beings can't be easily replaced — we are too complicated, illogical and unpredictable. I’m not overly impressed by Chat GPT (I find it really repetitive). Yes our brains are computers but there is also a mysterious element to human life that a machine can't easily copy (in my opinion).
The optimist in me believes that AI (used well) could be a good thing. Or at least — save some lives. Help and support in bigger ways. Medicine. Communication. Assistance.
Maybe humans will be treated as humans and not machines, because the machines can be the machines. Maybe productivity culture can be left to the robots and the arts and culture and creativity and ideas and evolution and “leading with love” can be left to the humans. I don't know. Who knows. I am trying to embrace it all with curiosity — because it's less stressful than being afraid all the time.
To write further on this topic, I reached out to
, a fabulous wordsmith who writes an internet culture newsletter called Embedded which covers digital stories and interviews with Very Online People (they also recently interviewed me!) She has previously written for The New York Times, Atlantic, Vulture and more. Today, I’m honoured that Kate has written an exclusive piece for The Hyphen. This isn’t exactly a piece about ‘how avoid AI’ but more so a reflective piece on maintaining our human creativity no matter what. Enjoy. Over to Kate…
Reclaiming our creativity in an AI world
A guest column by Kate Lindsay