AI has come for creative jobs
...but it's no substitute for human creativity
I grew up in Michigan, so I know all about industries being upended. When I was a teen, Japanese auto makers started to dominate the market with cars Americans wanted: small, fuel-efficient, reliable. American auto makers were stuck in the 60s, and their employees suffered. But in the end, competition led to necessary changes. Complacent companies had to retool their thinking and compete with companies that, frankly, were making a better product.
Further back in history, when cars started to gain in popularity, blacksmiths didn’t protest that the government needed to protect their jobs. Blacksmiths retrained so they could fix cars. This is the way progress should work.
Enter this new age, where many of us, especially creative people working as writers, graphic designers, and musicians, are being supplanted by a new entity: AI. If I can justify the pain caused to blacksmiths and auto workers, why don’t I have the same reaction to AI?
There’s a huge difference between the blacksmith and Japanese car examples and what’s happening now. Blacksmiths were forced to change careers because of technological progression. American auto makers were forced to update their assembly lines in order to make a better product. But AI is doing the opposite: it’s giving people the ability to make an inferior product for free.
AI is taking us backwards
In the last hundred years, commercial creative products underwent a revolution. Industries hired creative people who improved the quality of commercial creative work immeasurably. Take a movie made in the 30s and a movie made in the 2000s and listen to their soundtracks—not just the music but also the sound design. There was an astounding surge, not only in the technical aspects but also in the creative exploration. You can see the same thing in every aspect of commercial products that used the skills of creative people.
Those of you who are fine artists of any sort are probably yelling at the screen right now and telling me that this was all a load of commercial junk. Why celebrate it? I agree that most commercial products are far from art. But my point here is that many creative people made their living applying their skills to commercial products. From writers to painters, we largely didn’t make our living through high art. We made our living writing catalogue descriptions, designing advertisements, or scoring soundtracks for commercials. And AI is taking that away.
But AI isn’t forcing positive changes in the creative industry in the way that technological advances did in the past. It was inevitable that as technology advanced, we weren’t going to use living creatures to haul our stuff around anymore. Mechanical devices for doing hard labor are an actual improvement in every way (especially once we complete the transition to renewable energy sources). AI is actually doing a worse job at everything. Just this morning my husband, a technologist, exclaimed out loud at a blog piece he was reading, “This is obvious AI crap.” It was in his feed where he usually sees insightful, well-written tech commentary.
The job of creative people is now to teach AI how to steal their jobs better
Not only is AI doing a worse job in its creative output, but it’s preying on the work of creative people to make the transition. First, AI was trained on the work of countless unsuspecting creative people. Now, creative people are literally being employed to train AI to take their jobs. I know someone who is in the process right now of designing AI queries that are replacing human writers that their company used to employ. How long till the AI is instructed to replace the managers, also?
But the problem with our current trajectory is that while AI has been tooled to examine our creative output and mimic it, there is no way to teach AI what humans instinctively know how to do: look at what’s being produced and find ways to make it better and more original. AI can only take the smorgasbord of creative output by humans and rearrange it. Unlike the living human brain, it has no way of experiencing the human world and building on the daily human experience.
Unlike human progress, AI’s output will just steadily devolve
My prediction is that as more AI-generated content is out there, new AI-generated content will become worse and worse. As AI starts to use its own crap as a model for generating new crap, the writing will get more trite, the art will get more ridiculous, and the sound will get blander. We’ll be stewing in a commercial culture that has not just gone backwards, it’s gone to a ho-hum place that human creativity never led us.
My other prediction is that humans will be like frogs in a heating pot of water—we won’t know to jump out before we get cooked into accepting this crap as the standard. Most consumers are not discerning enough to notice the difference between a film with fabulous sound design and one with simply passable sound design. They experience the difference, to be sure, but they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint why they liked one movie over another. So as more and more films employ AI-generated crap, our ears will become more complacent. We’ll start to take for granted a life of AI-generated mediocrity.
But what about fine art?
The prediction business is a dangerous one, but I’d love to predict the opposite for non-commercial art. As commercial products become more bland, less human, more catering to people’s tastes and less challenging to their senses, I think that some people will become more appreciative of “real” human art than they were before. There are precursor examples: the resurgence of interest in vinyl records was spurred by the blandness of digital recording, reproduction, and distribution. I hope that many people will come to treasure work that has actual human creativity embedded in it.
The upcoming episode of The Babblery features an interview with avant garde composer Anne Hege. (Want to get notifications here at Substack or in your podcast app? Subscribe!) I want to hope that work like Anne’s is what will save us, continuing to bring real humans together at the same time as using our advances in technology as a tool for creating art… a tool, not a substitute.
What can we do about it?
This is where I get out of the prediction business. I feel like everything we’ve traditionally done is not going to have much effect:
Protest: We’ve been doing that, but is anyone listening?
Sue: That’s starting to happen, but in many ways it’s simply too late.
Educate: One by one, we’ll remind those frogs that the water was not always this hot, but will they believe us?
All I can say is this:
Keep making art! Do it for no reason at all if you have to, but refuse to stop practicing the most important fundamental quality of humanity, creativity.
I’d love to hear your ideas.
Insightful and thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing!