Will AI Kill Creativity and Art?

Hewan Wendwesen

May 15, 2023 | 3 minutes read | Lifestyle | 381 |

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Hewan Wendewesen explores the latest developments in AI, and what the possible implications could be for the creative community.

One of the controversies raised when we think of AI taking over is "would AI kill creativity and art." Humans are always driven to create or participate in art to some extent, from children's snowmen and sandcastles to singing songs in the shower, doodles in the margins of notebook to all the way back to ancient cave paintings from history long before ours. People will always seek out creativity, sometimes idly, sometimes more seriously and that will never change.

What AI might do is change the industry of art, and the incentives for putting serious time, money and skill investment into it. In a world where most people can ask an AI for artwork, which, to some extent, has an impact on artists making their living through freelance commissions and animation studios could cut staff because they can use AI to interpolate in-between frames. What this ends up doing is that it disincentives art as an "it pays the bills but I hate it" job and leaves it to people who either really love it or have the safety net to pursue it without care for profit or the sheer dedication of pursuing it without a safety net.

One effect we'll see is as these tools lower the barrier for entry for creating artwork, new kinds of artists aided or wholly dependent on these will flood the market. We might see traditional shops utilizing traditional pipelines being disrupted by upstart movie, game, music studios until the knowledge and availability of these tools settles down. Small fish will be able to make great works and the big fish will make even greater works and I think that's good for industrial art i.e. I don't think it'll fundamentally alter the dynamics of the attention economy in the short term. I think the disruption would even be less significant to paintings, sculpture and high art market. A lot of the recently successful so called "modern art" art objects do not hinge upon classical techniques to generate art moments. Beauty, craftsmanship, fidelity; nobody cares after a point. In the long term, I suppose we'll see this effect play out in movie & game market when every movie looks better than your Cameroon and Hiyazaki. After a point, when a 5 person team can produce products competitive with whatever Big Hollywood can push out, companies as big as Universal and Ubisoft might not have enough of the pie to sustain themselves.

Our brain has its own native language. Its own ontology and symbol graph. Of course, it's very much informed by the all the languages and symbols we grew up with but one head very different from the other. And every time we want to get an idea from our head to another, we have translated our personal language to a common one. Some things are no doubt lost in translation. Some things are almost impossible to translate.

It's great that these tools give us access to better art when we find ourselves with motivation and time to use more than simple efficient words. It will be no doubt easier to draw pantyhose than to "poem" pantyhose. Will it ever be easier to craft paintings as it's to craft words? Probably not, Words are extremely efficient for most purposes, a single symbol for a single idea. But there's a lot of ground on which they lack. We might see usage of "personally crafted art" (as opposed to emojis, memes and gifs) increase in our average conversation.

Moreover, people will always take value in handmade pieces. A handmade item of clothing/jewelry isn't just an item; it has a story attached to it. And if I'm commissioning art of a character I have, and the artist likes the concept too, that's a conversation, we're both getting involved in the creative process, we're connecting over shared love of an idea.

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