Comment: A monochromatic sketch circulating the internet shows a group of determined painters beating up a photographer in his studio.
The headline attached could lead you to believe that the picture is from 1865, but the truth is that it’s actually an AI-generated image created by an Instagram user.
In this, you can almost hear a post-modern Luddite echo of machines being crushed under the anxiety of new technology emerging. This time technology is coming for people working with words and images rather than physical work.
People who deal in ideas and creativity face a challenging time. Technology has given rise to an explosion of channels, tools and forms of sharing and earning a living from ideas and creativity – and technology also seems to challenge the very nature of creativity itself. If artificial intelligence software can produce images and words that look like they have been created by humans, then what is the difference between ‘artificial creativity’ and ‘human creativity’?
The emergence of artificial intelligence is leading to questions about the relevance of artists and creatives because a machine could ostensibly be prompted to emulate any style and create anything.
We’ve been in this territory before. The advent of photography technology prompted a similar question: if a photograph can capture an exact replication of real life, then what good is the artist?
Spanish great Pablo Picasso painted in the early decades of the photographic revolution and was among those confronted by the threat of this rising technology. He was asked many times about this and his thinking evolves as he learns more. From his sarcastic remark “I have discovered photography. Now, I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn” to his more nuanced: “Now, at least we know everything that painting isn’t.”
In a similar way, software like ChatGPT, DALL·E, Midjourney and others show us what uniquely human thought and creativity isn’t. It isn’t mimicking someone else’s style, or rewriting a piece of text in a different tone. This technology is staggering in terms of what it can do and how it will continue to impact us, but it isn’t human creativity.
I would say it creates content. Sometimes that content is good and created with amazing efficiency, often it is not what you are looking for. For those who create generic content, AI systems are a direct challenge today.
So the challenge is to not create generic content.
The content can also be the starting point for human creativity. Picasso could be describing the process in his own work: “When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.”
Every decision to destroy and rework the content is an act of human creativity. It’s not about what AI is taking away from us, but rather that it’s giving us extra bandwidth to try more varied things.
I’d also argue that artificial intelligence creativity is useful, not as an efficiency gain for humans but as a new perspective. Many of us will have seen those creepy hands that AI image generators used to create, or laughed at other mistakes from these tools. What is a ‘mistake’ to us arises from a fundamentally non-human way of understanding the world. Sometimes a completely new perspective can be a catalyst for a rich vein of new thinking.
Any suggestion that AI somehow replaces or denigrates human creativity is as woefully misdirected as claims more than 150 years ago that painters would become irrelevant in the age of photography.
Without Picasso’s creative perspective, we would never have felt the painful emotion expressed in the masterpieces commemorating the death of the artist’s best friend Carles Casagemas.
And without the creative perspective of today’s problem solvers across business, AI will simply be another tool that spits out random unusable content.
As has always been the case with technological advancement, the new AI paintbrushes at our disposal are only as good as the artists wielding them.
