A.I. is Killing Creativity
We’re moving closer to a creative-less existence
Let’s start with a question: If we automate all the creative endeavors in the world (for example, videography, photography, music, art, design, and writing), then… what is the point of being alive?
I bring this up because of recent A.I. developments that surfaced this week. Of course, I’m talking about OpenAI’s latest model, Sora, a text-to-video generative A.I tool. Like ChatGPT, you enter a prompt, and bam, you have a strange cat video where the person’s hand is detached. Put in another prompt, and wham, you have a woman walking down the street with her legs doing all sorts of weird skips. Put in another prompt, and bingo, you have a video of a couple walking in the snow while everyone around them disappears into thin air.
It’s impressive-ish but far from perfect. Just serviceable enough until your brain snaps out of the trance, and you enter the uncanny valley. Of course, OpenAI and others will keep pushing until it becomes difficult to tell what is generated content and what is human-produced content. But there are bigger questions at play.
Is it even useful? Sort of, if you want to produce videos that are, as Ed Zitron describes, “reality-adjacent, but not actually realistic.” There’s a reason for that — and a big part of why human-produced content is leagues ahead. Remember, A.I. doesn’t know anything. It works off of hard-coded rules, processes and data sets that it’s trained off. It means it doesn’t know what you’re talking about when you prompt it, but it does know how to give you a result back based on its extensive catalog of reference data.
More importantly, do we need it? No. What we’re seeing with these models is the continued efforts of a few companies to push away from human creativity. (To clarify: I don’t consider typing in prompts as being creative.) Rather than turn to a professional or a passionate creator who has invested their life in videography (or photography, art, or writing, for that matter) and can offer a wealth of deep knowledge and understanding of a subject based on personal experience, Sam Altman and his merry men want us to turn to “democratized” technology, so we can mindlessly produce the output ourselves, only a more procedural, human-lite version.
Again, always consider the true motive. Does OpenAI really give a shit about how many people can make videos? No. The reality is that it needs a new product to shill as interest and usage in ChatGPT slowly begin to wane. As the title of this newsletter alludes, the bigger goal of A.I. companies is to turn creativity into a commodity, not because it’s a net benefit to society, but because the more people who can access this so-called creativity, the more people they can sell it to.
This is what these companies really mean when they talk about “democratizing creativity.” They want to dismantle the very thing that makes creativity so special, so unique — the talent, the dedication and the vision.
With the continued attempts of tech companies to force A.I. technology into everything around us while simultaneously selling us the distorted dream of living our lives in alternative realities through headsets, we’re beginning to move closer to a creative-less existence — a world where we plug ourselves into our headsets, lost in a fantasy land we’re told is better than base reality, achieving creativity with no effort, sitting in our own filth, drooling, waiting for Big Tech to feed us our next dopamine hit.
Okay, that’s a bit extreme (I hope?) But it’s not far off what some of the tech companies want to sell you with “democratized” technology. They don’t care about creativity. They don’t care what it means to be creative or the unparalleled personal growth and satisfaction that come with learning to do something that gets those creative juices flowing in your brain. They just care about getting more and more people to use their products — and become dependent on using those products — because of money. They don’t care about the process of creativity itself; they care that you use their technology more than anyone else’s.
I feel the pursuit of A.I. has gone backward. Or, perhaps, it was backward from the start. I am tech-cynical, but you always hope new technologies deliver something that improves society as a whole. And then, it always goes the same way: the needs of society are pushed aside in pursuit of profit.
Why are we trying to dumb down creativity to the basic input of “enter what you want to create”?
Why aren’t we focused on automating the mundane stuff that stops us from or eats into our motivation to take up more creative ventures?
Call me a traditionalist, or a delusionist, or whatever, but to me, creativity shouldn’t be democratized. It shouldn’t be made available to everyone and anyone at the touch of a button or the typing of a prompt. Creativity is, by definition, finite and limited, because not everyone has it in them to commit to the pursuit of mastering a creative endeavor. And that’s fine. If you don’t have the capacity, the skill, or the patience to take up a creative pursuit, that’s just the way it is. Why should something that has taken others years to master become available to you?
Sure, those who are making A.I. stuff believe they are still being creative. But to me, creative people in the traditional sense are those who dedicate themselves to a craft.
It’s becoming apparent that with the advance of A.I., those two can’t co-exist, and only one is going to lose out.
It strikes an interesting parallel with another movement — universal basic income. In a society where most jobs are automated by robots, the population would get paid a living wage to basically buy the machine-produced commodities (to keep the economy afloat) and to fuck around. In this vision of the future, the idea is that humanity would occupy its increased free time by diving into creativity and the arts and following their passions. The problem is that creativity isn’t meant to be one of those commodities. It was meant to be the main reason to exist in a world where work is fully automated.
So ask yourself again, if we automate everything, creativity included, what’s the point?
On this Trend Mill this week
You are bot you eat — One of Elon Musk’s stipulations throughout the acquisition talks to buy Twitter was that the platform had to prove that less than 5% of the accounts were bots. Yes, it was an attempt to back out of the deal, but after he was forced to purchase the platform, it was the beginning of Musk’s war on the bots. How is that battle going? Badly. During Super Bowl weekend, a massive chunk of that traffic was fake. You have to laugh; CEO Linda Yaccarino called X “literally the best screen (and seat) in the house.” It seems that’s not the case, unless you wanted to watch the game alongside swathes of fake people who have “P UＳＳ Y ＩＮ ＢＩＯ.”
The apes are down — Asset manager Coatue Management has cut the valuation of NFT marketplace OpenSea by 90%. Ouch. OpenSea is one of the biggest marketplaces and highlights just how far this craze has fallen. Despite crypto prices recovering (and closing in on an ATH), NFTs have failed to find a second wind. I wonder why… (oh wait, I know this one. They’re pointless).
“Go woke, go broke” — Google has apologized for “missing the mark” after its A.I. platform has been accused of racism; in this case, for refusing to generate a white person of any sort for anything, leading to racially diverse Nazis and more. It’s another example of the problems A.I. is facing, which is that it often amplifies racial and gender stereotypes, and yet attempts to fix this only seem to make it swing the other way.
AI is anathema to creativity
I agree. However I think it’s important to distinguish between a large language model, which is what a generative pre-trained transformer is
And neural net technology, which is the inference part, and could, several years from now, have agency and be creative