The best creative work smacks you in the face and makes you shout, “What the heck did I just experience?” The best books, movies, and music cause confrontation in your mind. They shift your perspectives. They prompt involuntary, visceral reactions.
Creative work produced by AI does none of those things.
Don’t get me wrong, I love using AI for lots of tasks. It’s like working with the world’s best intern. Even better. But it creates content that reflects the most common attributes of the topic. And “most common” is almost never what produces the best.
When you witness original creations, you get the sense that there was toil involved. Leonardo da Vinci, painting the delicate skin tones of his subjects, applied dozens of ultra-thin layers of diluted paint, building up to a surface that looked soft and organic. There’s depth to that skin. It looks human, even though it’s just paint on a wood panel. It shows subtle variability, and hints to the fact that it was created by blending delicate technique and artistic sensibilities.
AI does some things incredibly well. It receives information in the form of a task, goes out to search the vast universe of established material related to the topic, and fashions a response, probabilistically assembled piece by piece, to reframe what’s already out there. Rinse, wash, repeat.
AI allows lots of people to create lots of content, almost effortlessly. But mourn that widespread adoption of AI is creating a widespread migration to the creative middle. It’s narrowing the extremes. It’s shrinking the proportion of work that’s truly terrible, and that’s saying something. But what it’s also shrinking is the proportion of work that is powerfully original.
Sometimes you see something and think, Well, that was obviously created by a robot. When you adopt AI to create something new that you call your own, you are promoting new iterations of sameness. You are adding to the rising tide of, meh! Forget global warming; this is a movement of global blanding. Don’t use AI to erase your individuality!
AI as a substitute for human creativity is like an all-you-can-eat buffet of crappy food. Calories? Plenty. Memorable? No way.
Using AI is easy — a lot easier than creating comparable work organically. But when the creative population uses AI as a substitute for organic creativity, it shifts a burden from the creator to the consumer. Hungry consumers must wade through an ever-growing pool of pablum to find nourishment.
AI is serving to increase content quantity, but that says nothing of its quality. AI-generated content may seem sensible and intelligent, and it’s easy to swallow. There may be some gems too. But, in aggregate, AI-generated work is boring. It’s the product of the consensus.
By definition, original work is non-consensus. Original work creates an element of surprise. It produces something unexpected. Some of the greatest creative works take you on a journey, and you don’t know where you’re going or where you’ll end up. And that’s what makes it enjoyable. It resembles life! You don’t know what’s coming next, what’s coming tomorrow or the day after that. And that’s why it’s interesting.
AI-generated content is not like that. The element of surprise is largely missing. That is, except when there’s some kind of glitch or AI hallucination. It’s the AI goofs that are the most interesting! But that’s a topic for another day.
I see the widespread adoption of AI by creative people driving a great herd-migration to the middle where most content is adequate, reasonable, and largely lifeless.
Listen to the AI-generated Beatles tune, “Now and Then.” It was spawned from John Lennon’s original demo recording which, if you listen to it, is intimate, personal, a little melancholy, and so much more beautiful.
I see a creative population adopting AI as a crutch, prolifically cranking out a cacophony of Muzak that drowns the sounds of “My Way” and “Creep” and “What Was I Made For” and – insert your favorite song here. It’s like superimposing the faces of the 100 most beautiful people on top of each other. The result is a composite face that looks completely… unremarkable.
AI also changes the person who uses it. It makes us lazy. It makes us dependent. It makes our creative muscles flabby and wimpy. Our sensibilities get dull. We lose the ability to judge if the work is any good or not, and so we ask AI to self-validate the work it has created. Then, what good are we, except to feed prompts into a machine? Soon, we realize that our part in the process is not even necessary, because the machine can create its own prompts. And it never calls in sick or goes to sleep. Just think of how much content will be created when we humans surrender and just let AI do all the creating for us!
Producing truly creative work takes effort. It takes focus. But with AI doing the work for you, the process of producing creative work requires almost no bandwidth. Some will say, that’s the point! I get it. But there’s something lost in that process.
AI is offering to make the process effortless, but the effort is what’s important. In a way, the effort is the reward. Just as there’s a benefit to doing physical activity, there’s also a benefit to doing creative activity. When you’re forced to think through an issue and clarify your thoughts, that work is hard, but rewarding. There’s some great sense of pride that you feel when you do some original work, complete that work, and then share it with the world. That experience is very gratifying. When AI does the work for you… Not so much.
Using AI for your creativity is like getting a prize for just showing up. Sure, AI democratizes the content-creation process and allows more people to produce more stuff. But the process is shallow, not deep. It leaves us wandering through an infinite, fluorescent supermarket of content, surrounded by millions of perfectly wrapped packages that are empty. We are slowly sinking in a cold, statistical ocean of average, starving for a single spark of wild, unpasteurized, beautiful human connection to remind us we are still alive.
So, what’s the message? The message is, think about which activities are best for AI and which are best for your own creative mind. Go ahead and continue using AI to summarize and fact-check and analyze and calculate and concatenate. But don’t use AI for everything. Don’t use it as a substitute for your own human voice when your own human voice can have so much more impact.
There’s no substitute for the organic, messy process of creativity. That process can produce unusual, electric, surprising work, showing a window where your human heart beats with a beautiful rhythm, imperfect as it is. And that process can also create a greater sense of satisfaction. For the creator and for the consumer, both experiencing a joy that only a living heart can feel.
