GenAI Is Trying to Kill Creativity

Finally, humans are pushing back

Image: “Joker in the pack” / Badly edited by author

A ‘joker in the pack’ is a person or thing that could change a situation in an unexpected way.

For Sam Altman and his fellow AI grifters, they are certainly changing the creative landscape — just not in the way they hoped. 

This week, my feeds have been dominated by the Luma Dream Machine, another AI model that can create videos from text prompts. The results have been pretty awful. Somebody turned classic memes into videos, somehow producing something worse than the videos the memes are based on. Or remember The Flash film that was widely ridiculed for its laughable CGI? It can rest easy now, as GenAI has shown it could have been a lot worse. 

It's the same but different to OpenAI's maybe-to-be-released model, Sora. 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.

Despite people claiming to be blown away by these developments, let's get serious for a second — it's barely impressive-ish. It's just serviceable enough until your brain snaps out of the trance, and you enter the uncanny valley. 

I don't get it. 

Is this sort of Gen AI even useful? If you want to produce videos that are kinda real for a split second until the facade falls apart, then sure. 

Even if/when it improves, a more important question remains — do we need it? 

I like the way Brian Merchant puts it;

"[As] the limitations of generative AI become painfully clear, as the companies responsible for it become more ethically compromised: What is the AI-generated variety for? People generally prefer humans in customer service over AI and automated systems. AI art is widely maligned online; teens have taken to disparaging it as "Boomer art." AI doesn't offer better products, necessarily: It just offers more, and for less money."

The AI companies know this. That's why we're seeing their continued efforts 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.

Always consider the motive. 

Take OpenAI. Does it 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 begins to wane, just at the point Sam Altman has moved the company to being for-proft. It needs more products, more users, and more money. It's why they signed the terrible deal with Apple, in which Apple isn't paying a cent for its users to use ChatGPT — and only if they opt-in every time to do so (the deal will actually cost OpenAI money). It's desperate to spread wide and broad in any way it can, seemingly at the expense of good business acumen.

It’s clear that the bigger goal of AI companies is to turn creativity into a commodity.

They want to dismantle the very thing that makes creativity so unique — the talent, the dedication and the vision — and package it up in a shiny ChatGPT wrapper to sell back to us.

With the continued attempts of tech companies to force AI 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 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 of learning to do something that gets those creative juices flowing in your brain. They 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; they care that you use their technology more than anyone else's.

I'm losing my way here.

Returning to AI, I feel the pursuit 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.

Ask yourself this: why are we letting AI companies dumb down creativity to the basic input of "enter what you want to create"?

Call me a traditionalist — or a delusionist — 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 how it is. Why should something that has taken others years to master become available to you at the typing of a prompt? 

I already know that there will be those in the comments who are believe they are being creative by making AI stuff.

But to me, creative people are those who dedicate themselves to a craft.

And it's becoming apparent that these two camps can't co-exist.

We're only really a year into the AI trend, and already, it's leading to a movement of sorts — another divide in the creator spectrum. The anti-LLM stance is gaining momentum, with more and more creators, media sites and brands adopting a zero-use approach or branding themselves as human-first. Actors pushed back. Writers are demanding platforms remove AI work and prevent AI bots from training off their content. Music artists are following, with over 200 calling for protections against the "predatory use of AI" that "infringes upon and devalues the rights of artists." Sound familiar?

The audience is going to split down this line, too, choosing to support brands that do or don't use AI. Before you know it, you'll have AI companies that are hungry for profit trying to grow in an ever-shrinking market. Hype and bubbles will only carry you so far — if the audience turns against you, it's game over. 

As I said in the intro, Sam Altman thinks he and his fellow AI shillers are the joker in the pack, leading the revolution in creative output at the expense of creativity and creatives who give so much to their craft. 

It seems he's started the revolution all right — just not the one he was counting on.