The possible impact of AI on human creativity

AI, Life-lessons · 
13 mins read

A series of (rather disarranged) thoughts on the possible negative effects of AI on beginner’s creativity in the future.

I’m growing up in a world where the opportunities are almost endless. Generally speaking, as you might have already noticed, today you can easily do many more things than a few decades ago. I’m constantly reminded of this when I hear on videos I watch (from essays to tutorials, from devlogs to reviews) phrases along the lines of “It’s never been easier to do [insert task] than now!”.

By easy, I should note, I don’t just mean “simple”, but I’m also referring to the related meanings of “frictionless” and “accessible”.

Why are things easier, today? Well, I think there are at least three reasons:

  1. Making things easier, when it is possible without compromising other aspects, is a natural consequence of good human decisions and progress in general
  2. The access to information everywhere at any time allows to learn more things with less effort and resources
  3. AI is simplifying and automating many tasks, even some difficult ones, letting humans make “the easy part” (this of course doesn’t always apply as it’s very task-dependent)

This applies to many fields, but let’s take an example from the music industry.

If you were a beginner musician in the past and wanted to make and release your music, it was, simply speaking, an awful experience:

I’m not talking from personal experience, but many, many artists have witnessed these career difficulties.

What about today? Let’s see:

It is still true that musicians, producers and songwriters are still encountering problems (e.g. minimal revenue through low royalties, difficulty in discovery through a saturated market, dependency on the platform’s algorithms, and the cold start problem), but given how many more artists get on Spotify each year, over 10 million (source), it seems to me that the music industry of today is much more accessible than in the past.

The fact that it is easier than ever to get into new fields (music, game development, programming, and so on) as a beginner is an incredible achievement in today’s society. Granting beginners a low barrier to enter the world of their passion is the first step to bringing them closer to achieving their life objectives and eventually realizing their dreams.

Of course, increased accessibility doesn’t guarantee success: the global market (in almost every category) is now overcrowded and the quality expectations are very high, so competing and standing out from everyone else is much more difficult than in the past.

Not only that. Before it was flooded by what I like to call the “generative AI revolution” (from DALL·E onwards), the world was still tough for beginners, even considering all the accessibility advantages.

When these people at the beginning of their careers found an obstacle on their way, they (quite intuitively) had to learn the skills to overcome it. They mostly had to do it themselves, watch a tutorial, or ask an educator or a friend, but still, they had to dedicate some time to learn the necessary technical skills to express their creativity in the best way.

Before talking about AI, though, I want to a bit more context by telling you about a related experience of mine.

The importance of mistakes for reaching creativity

When I started making music, I soon had to learn some software to write it down, record and arrange it. Just experimentation on the piano keys wasn’t going to produce anything useful. After trying some other software, I decided to learn Ableton from scratch. It wasn’t easy, it took a lot of time and determination and today I still have to learn a lot, but I finally acquired the basic technical skills to be able to express my creative ideas fairly accurately and in a sharable way. It would have been so much harder to learn that software a decade ago for many reasons (less documentation and tutorials online, less intuitive UI, more limitations, etc.), but I still had a lot of trouble anyway doing it in more recent times, as is normal for every beginner.

All the trial and error and friction required to learn how to use Ableton was, in my initial view, a limit to accessing the creative freedom*by “creative freedom” I mean the flexibility of expressing anything creative coming from inside yourself I was searching for, while in reality it all was beneficial in the end: these limits led me to better understand what I wanted to create and got me involved in the work much more. The limitations and challenges encountered along the way motivated me to improve my skills and competencies.

For example, listening to a lot of music from talented people and trying many times to recreate what they achieved (or reach their level of “perfection”), which was often tedious and/or hard to do, made me more aware of the limits and possibilities in the world of music and forced me to learn new skills. This was the “creative experience” I had obtained.

Improvement through experience is required to achieve great outcomes

Creative ideas within your mind are almost never “the final product”, the thing you actually want to achieve. First, you need to make a rough version and then start to improve on it, perhaps even changing your original idea with something radically different.

You might need several iterations of an idea before it finally clicks. As said by the content creator NeatOnTheRocks in this video, “improving at your craft means you’re able to make more intentional choices and more accurately express yourself”, and that improvement, even to the smallest extent, is always necessary.

Only through research, making mistakes, overcoming difficulties and comparing your results with those of others, do you shape and refine your idea in what becomes the artist’s work that everyone can enjoy.

This set of experiences is what allows humans to create great things.

“Good outcomes require good taste, and good taste requires plenty of experience in the field you are working on.” — me :)

But why did I reference a time before the generative AI revolution?

Inexperience and AI

Keeping in mind the context of what I’ve said in the previous examples, I’m slightly worried about something. I fear that from now on, in the face of the seemingly infinite possibilities that the generative AI models are going to offer (from text to image generation), humans will start to encounter fewer limits and obstacles due to imprudent automation. This will cause a decline in the number of people with experience and proficiency in creative skills, which are necessary and fundamental to express their ideas to their full potential, and consequently, creative freedom and variety will diminish.

As AI becomes increasingly proficient at generating content, there’s a risk that humans will rely on it too heavily, given our natural lazy tendency, eroding our own creative abilities and technical experience.

Indeed, while AI can simplify some aspects of the creative process, it is important to recognize that true creativity arises from a balanced combination of knowledge, experience, innovation, and an extensive understanding of the fundamental principles of human emotions.

Although AI will reduce the skill barriers to self-expression (meaning, it becomes easier to make creative work that attempts to reflect what someone wants to express), there will be nothing substantial to express about oneself without first having acquired relevant experience in the “hard” (traditional) way.

Picture an independent, beginner filmmaker, let’s call it John, who relies on AI to make a movie. In the hypothetical situation that John lacks the technical (and non-technical) expertise and experience of professionals, the AI would handle the various aspects of filmmaking for him, while John would feel empowered to focus more on creative storytelling and his artistic vision. However, being so inexperienced, John would not be able to make an interesting, non-trivial or even decent movie, because lacking knowledge leads to a barely decent creation at best.

You could argue that a filmmaker doesn’t need to know all the tools and technical details in order to make great movies. After all, a team of other people or AI tools would handle the technical part for him.

However, making a good work is not just about mere technical proficiency, but also the ability to make informed decisions about your creation, which relies heavily on your own understanding of the medium.

Without a solid grasp of the fundamental principles of filmmaking (just like any other creative field), like storytelling conventions, camera techniques, editing principles, etc., John may struggle to make a story that resonates with his public, or even evokes any emotional response at all.

Also, I think considering technical proficiency secondary to creativity is simply wrong:

You get the idea.

All this to say that, at least from what I’m currently seeing, beginners will try to skip to the top by empowering themselves with AI. In reality, though, they’ll have to work their way up the ladder if they want to achieve success through their creative work, like everyone has done so far.

P.S.: I know this is a long and not very cohesive post, so here’s a little AI-generated TLDR that sums it all up well, being accurate to what my thoughts are:

TLDR;

Update (02/07/2024)

After writing this post, musician, YouTuber and educator Rick Beato released a video that addresses arguments and concerns quite similar to mine, particularly regarding the world of music. Here’s the video if you are curious:

He mainly discusses these key points:

As you can see from the first point, it seems like I’m not the only artist who is becoming worried about this “creativity decline” problem, and I hope with this post to let more people know about what we should expect and what to avoid in the future, preserving the meaningful, human part in our works.

I recently saw two new videos, one from Drew Gooden and one from Andrew Huang, both containing very interesting and valid points making them particularly useful to think critically about this whole AI situation. I encourage you to watch them too if this problem interests you!

In this video, focusing on the section about AI music and the ending part, Drew Gooden clearly explains the problems we are encountering through the rising conflict (and competition) between AI and human artists, but also the fact that increased accessibility is great as long as you exploit it to further improve your skills, and don’t use AI to make it do everything for you (because at that point the human would be an “operator”, not an “artist”). The strenuous process of figuring out how to make a work is the irreplaceable essence of human creativity:

Here, the musician Andrew Huang responds to the backlash he received from his community after making a product using AI-generated art, and in doing so he wisely acknowledges that AI has not only convenient benefits but also represents a threat to artists and creative work in general (including job displacement and ethical concerns). His “ambivalent” feelings on AI are very helpful to reflect on this topic from all perspectives. AI is now pervasive in our daily lives, and this doesn’t necessarily have to be strictly good or bad. However, in the end, human creativity and art always perseveres:

Post thumbnail previously generated with Microsoft Designer Image Creator, then altered and retraced by hand.


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