AI was never about democratizing creativity
I’ve started thinking a little bit about creativity in the context of AI. If you’ve known me for several years, you might be aware that I’m really not a fan of the word “creativity” or of its noun and adjective form “creative”. I’ve mellowed on it a little bit over the years, but generally speaking I still believe that it’s a wildly misused buzzword with dubious meaning in the average colloquial setting, and that lots of people actually have no idea what creativity is. It really bothers me when people conflate creativity with artistic ability, or when people act like it’s some sort of gene you either have or don’t, instead of understanding that it’s a skill you can improve. But in a lot of ways, it’s the best word we have, and so I’m going to use it today.
One of my biggest issues with people who aggressively push AI and keep telling us to embrace it because it’s “the future”, especially those at the top who are making insane buckets of money from it, is that they seem to neither understand nor respect creativity. That’s literally what they’re selling – automated creativity – in theory, anyway. Why deal with a human who is going to spend valuable time and money and resources trying to come up with new ideas when you can instead purchase this tool that will do it for you?
The problem with this, obviously, is that new ideas don’t come out of nowhere. The people at the top almost certainly know this, because most executives actually aren’t stupid, but techbros aggressively shilling AI “art” and “vibecoding” almost certainly either don’t know or don’t care. The point of AI companies isn’t to help you automate the tedious parts of your job so that you have more headspace to do the more interesting parts of your job, it’s to turn you into a reverse centaur doomed to spend your waking hours checking the work done by AI (if you don’t believe me, go read Cory Doctorow.)
And then techbros are out here glorifying being able to get results in seconds as if that was the point, as if being able to do things at breakneck speed is actually useful to people who want to breakthrough and innovate, when in reality coming up with anything useful often requires you to try things and spend time interacting with and combining different ideas and talking to people and all of those things require you to have available headspace, so that you can think. Using AI is anti-thinking. No, you writing a prompt that generated an artwork is not the same as you having an idea and that idea shifting over time as you work on it and respond to influences and talk to people and change your mind. Same goes with most of these sorts of endeavours, by the way. What, you think the AI is going to come up with the same quality of solution as an actual human who talks to all of the stakeholders, tries to understand what they all want, and delivers a solution?
That’s the problem with “results now” culture. AI was never about democratizing creativity (which was already accessible anyway – go do stuff, no one is stopping you). Anyone who tells you this is either lying to you or lying to themself. AI is about conditioning people to stop thinking for themselves and giving them no excuse to not be hyperproductive.
Constant hyperproductivity, by the way, is not how you innovate. That is not how major breakthroughs are usually made.
Anyway. These are just in-progress thoughts.