Is AI the death knell for creative folks?

The news cycle is swamped with stories about how artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the world as we know it.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft recently announced they planned to build an array of nuclear reactors to generate enough electricity to meet its burgeoning AI projects’ energy demands.

Artificial intelligence is booming, there’s no doubt about it – even if we might debate whether the pace of change is slowing slightly.

It is transforming how businesses operate in every single industry. It is challenging our concepts of publishing and testing the limits of copyright law. It is redefining how we contact customer service and analysing our energy use for our service providers to adjust how the grid works. These are but a handful of examples of where AI is being deployed.

AI is, whether we realise it or not, on track to touch almost any and every aspect of our lives in the near future.

But what does this mean for creative folks?

There’s a sentiment doing the rounds online at the moment:

I want AI to do my laundry and wash my dishes so I have more time to write and create, not write and create for me so I have more time to do my laundry and wash the dishes.

In light of the AI revolution, many creative professionals are seeing the growing capacity of this technology and starting to worry about their job security. Writers, editors, designers, marketers, journalists and many more people are looking at the frantic pace of development, increasing volume of use cases and explosion of tools on the market with grave concern.

Should we be worried? Should we buy into the doom and gloom narrative surrounding AI?

Reframe

As a tech editor specialising in innovation, I receive dozens of press releases per day. Of them, I’d say half include AI in some form – probably more.

AI will undoubtedly catalyse change for creative folk. As with any change, some of it will be painful. But there is also inherent opportunity involved – and it all depends on how we frame the change.

Many artists heralded the arrival of photography in the 1800s as an enemy of art. Instead, it catalysed new outlets for creativity and transformed existing ones. Art didn’t die and nor will creative work in light of AI’s arrival.   

When it comes to the job loss dynamic, the nature of employment has evolved for centuries.

New technology has changed how we work – for better or worse – since time immemorial. The arrival of the Industrial Revolution transformed how we farmed and produced goods. The telephone and internet both redefined communication. Emerging scientific discoveries overhauled medicine and healthcare. As new technologies arrive, the nature of work evolves.

The long story short is if you’re worried AI might take your job, then it almost certainly can, or could in the near future.

The question is how we respond, adapt and grow in light of these developments.

At the moment, much of the debate about AI and creative work gravitates around outputs: content production and marketable outcomes.

But this conceptualisation is reductive and unfair on what it means to be creative.

Creativity is a process, it is communication, it is self-reflection, it is connection, and yes, I’ll go there: it is one of the essences of humanity.

I have yet to see a manifestation of artificial intelligence which will ever replace these underlying truths.

But it can alleviate some of the manual, time-intensive processes that hold us back from doing our creative work.

When we expand the understanding of what it means to be creative and move away from equating creativity with the outputs arising from it, AI becomes a friendlier development. Perhaps, even an empowering one.

If we reframe the mindset around AI from it being a threatening prospect to an enabling force supporting creativity and our lives around it, then the doom and gloom lightens.

AI can speed up the research process – even if we still need to apply human instinct rigorously to the insights generated.

AI can alleviate mundane tasks such as calendar management, writing emails or consuming large volumes of information.

AI can provide tools to help us tackle our own projects.

And sure, AI can’t physically do our laundry or wash our dishes for us so we have more time to write and create – yet. But Elon Musk’s Optimus bot might change that in the future.

Ultimately, artificial intelligence is not a death knell for creativity – instead, it is the bell heralding a new chapter in its ongoing story.    

What are your thoughts on AI and creativity?

Let me know in the comments below.

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