Artificial intelligence can generate creative works, what now?
Artificial intelligence can now generate unlimited creative works almost instantly. Not necessarily literally, but AI can now create text, images, audio, video, and edit these elements together to present a completed work, on demand. If you are a creative that makes a living working with any of those creative elements, this can be a stressful thing to think about. It isn’t far off to think that artificial intelligence will very soon be able to complete most job functions that a person would otherwise had needed to type into or scroll along a laptop. While some creative jobs may get replaced by artificial intelligence in the future, as long as humans are around, so will careers, jobs, tasks, or even DIY projects to occupy idle time in a fully automated, technology enabled future.
“Stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock ‘in the coming months.’ In addition, Shutterstock is launching a ‘Contributor Fund’ that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models,” reports The Verge.
Imagine walking your favorite art fair, going to a local art gallery opening, or admiring artwork at a nearby cafe. Do you imagine the art fair to be full of artists and people enjoying the day? At the local art gallery opening, would it eventually get boring if week after week the artist at the event was a nondescript supercomputer in a box? While waiting for your brewed tea latte, would you rather read an artists statement generated from an algorithm, or a story from someone in the community?
While jobs like writing news articles on stock prices may get replaced over time by an artificial intelligence, what may remain is the long read analysis written by a human author. An artificial intelligence may end up generating rudimentary social media graphics for business-to-business companies, but a startup clothing brand will likely benefit from hiring a photographer and graphic designer to create custom graphics that incorporate visuals of the product. An AI is already one of the most successful contemporary pop stars, but there will always be an audience for human musical acts that perform live.
Artificial intelligence can also be a tool to help people perform their creative pursuits better, faster and more experimentally. A single person can now generate infinite content, and can use to that new ability to create unlimited social media imagery for the app that they’re coding before they launch. An architect can use image and video generation to develop infinite concepts for clients, with relative ease. AI can be a symbiotic reality for creative people, if used to enhance one’s current ability.
As long as there are people, there will be jobs, tasks and creative pursuits. Creative work may evolve, but it will likely stay around as long as people do. While people are around, there will likely also be a need for human stories. Art is less about the work than the story of it. The context of artwork is what ascribes meaning to an object. If you made an artwork that you like, it’s partly because you made it. If you’re interested in the story of an artist, you may also find that meaning in their work. Even if you enjoy artwork just for its visual or craft appeal, there’s usually a cultural history to dive into that gives greater meaning to the work. Just because AI is here, doesn’t mean opportunities for people to be creative are going away. Even on the off chance that all jobs get automated by a computer, you may still want to paint a painting to pass the time.