Tech has a way of rewriting the aphorisms of the past. “The camera never lies”, for example, has long been consigned to the dustbin of history. Seeing is certainly not believing, and hasn’t been since Photoshop arrived on the scene. The latest one to fall is “computers automate, they don’t create”. This has been a comfort blanket for those of us in the creative professions, and it’s just been ripped away. AI is capable of creativity. And that changes everything.

Research carried out by my alma mater makes for alarming reading:

• while improving productivity and expanding opportunities to learn and develop for some, GenAI is worsening existing exploitative working conditions in creative industries
• GenAI has diminished the skill and agency of creative workers who are now often asked to review AI-generated work rather than creating their own original work, leading to a reduction in the financial value being attributed to creative work

Generative AI is coming for our creative jobs. And it’s a damn sight cheaper than we are. And so, we creatives face the same dilemma that has hit so many professions from weavers to typesetters, from bookkeepers to travel agents: how do we stay relevant when much of what we can do is automated?

Be better than AI

We’ve heard some good answers to that in the past. Memorably, at NEXT23 Harry Yeffs talked about how he uses AI as an antagonist, forcing him to up his performance game. The deeper truth lurking in that talk is that, to survive in a world of generative AI, you need to be better than AI. But that, on its own, is not enough. You need to be so much better, to deliver so much extra value, that it’s worth paying for.

I routinely use GenAI to illustrate posts on my personal blog, for example. But it’s time-consuming, frustrating, and I rarely get exactly what was in my head. And I never get anything better than I envisaged. If I was earning enough from it, the first thing I would do would be buy myself back the time I spend and gain the satisfaction of working with trusted illustrators and cartoonists that could deliver exactly what I want.

A similar thought crossed my mind while editing a forthcoming piece for NEXT Insights about how a government agency is deploying AI. At one level, I’m impressed by the vision outlined, but a part of me winced at the cost to stock photographers. But, again, that emphasises the reality of the new photographic landscape: you need to focus on the places where you have a unique edge over AI. That might be portraiture. That might be natural history photography. In essence, anywhere where the reality of the image is the crucial component of quality and thus, value.

Finding creative value in other places

A trend emerges: value is created in relationships. Value is created when dealing with reality. But one could argue that these are adjuncts to creativity, not the heart of creativity themselves. To push the thought further, could it be useful to borrow some of the language from innovation theory? There we talk about incremental, sustaining and disruptive innovation. Arguably, AI comes into play in the first two categories.

By their very nature, the diffusion models that underlie visual and video generative AI are base on existing patterns of creativity. Those are the patterns they’ve been trained on, and they’ll aim to achieve an image within those parameters. Thus, they are not truly capable of disruptive creativity. To put it another way:

• AI is capable of creativity within existing ideas
• AI is incapable of generating new frameworks of creativity
  

In other words, we have a familiar pattern emerging. Just as automation came for the low end of the weaving market, and spreadsheets came for the serried ranks of the bookkeepers, AI is coming for the low-value end of the creative industries. If you just want a throw-away image for a blog post, or a company report, AI is taking that job. In fact, it’s probably already got it.

What is creativity?

And that brings us back to the definition of creativity. Madoc Wade, at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, proposes this:

I propose that creativity is best understood as a propensity to create works which are both psychologically novel to the creator and appropriate. By psychological novelty, I mean work that is not an intentional copy of something else.

AI creativity does not meet that definition because it is merely a probabilistic creation based on existing work. And, of course, the “creator” has no psychological element to find it novel. AI creativity is fundamentally different from human creativity.

However, Wade does not extract much comfort for us from this insight:

Due to its ability to produce work of a sufficient technical standard to achieve these instrumental goals at a lower cost, AI poses an existential threat to the livelihoods and thus work of an entire class of ‘professional creatives’. But this does not leave us without any human creativity at all; the future may be a world of casual weekend watercolorists, alongside a class of ‘elite’ artists who continue to command interest in their work, partly at least, because of its human origins. Human creativity is under threat from AI, but it still has a place in our future.

Creatives are the new weavers

Ah, we’re back to weaving, aren’t we? Most weaving is now done by machines. But there’s still three areas where human having thrives:

• the hobbyist, where the pleasure of the process is the point
• the artisan, where the human nature of the product is the point
• the artist, where the novel creativity is the point
  

AI art is, in the language of the generation growing up with it, inescapably “mid”. Careers based on mediocre examples of creativity are done. Their work is much better performed in speed and cost terms by generative AIs.

The task of the human creative is to rise so far above the level delivered by the AI, that people are willing to pay us for it. Harry Yeffs was right two years ago: AI can be an antagonist that makes us better. We’re bringing more speaker on stage to explore the future of creativity in an age of AI at NEXT25. Let’s create a new vision of creative work, before too many jobs are lost…

Picture by Jr Korpa/ Unsplash.