Can we have an honest conversation about AI creativity?

I’m sick to death of AI chatter.  There’s so much of it, and it’s always delivered in the same four ways:

• shrieking, oft-exaggerated outbursts (“AI is stealing everyone’s jobs!”),
• doe-eyed wonder (“Wow, look what I asked ChatGPT to do!”),
• tight-jawed resignation (“We’ve all got to embrace AI”), or
• angry pushback (“AI is no good/can never replace humans”).

Browsing LinkedIn introduces you to a wide range of AI-based opinions, which are usually stated as absolute fact (“Unpopular opinion: print is DEAD”/ “No-one will tell you this, but ALL writers use AI” / “Here’s the DEFINITIVE way to spot AI when consuming content”).

That recent ‘AI caricature’ trend was so annoying, it almost saw me leave LinkedIn for a second and final time.  Same goes for all the “don’t do this, do that”-type lecture-posting, which always compels me to do whatever I’m being told not to.

It’s all very depressing.  But more than anything else, AI chatter is exhausting.

I’d really like to see more calm thought and reasoning around AI, rather than all the hysterical online chatter.  For the record, I don’t necessarily agree that “we’ve all got to embrace AI”.  It just feels that way because AI is everywhere, and it’s (largely) free and easy… for now, at least.  And just as I use a calculator because I’m terrible at maths, non-writers will use AI to write for them.*

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, and reading a lot of articles, about AI writing.  People keep asking me if AI has affected my work (it has, of course) and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at all worried.

(This is the bit where I’m supposed to talk about how AI writing will never match the depth and quality of human writing.  But I’m not going to say that).

For me, the problem with AI writing – with AI creativity in general – isn’t that bots can’t mimic human output. Clearly, they can.  As Joshua Rothman says in his insightful article for The New Yorker (Is it wrong to write a book with A.I.?), “the big picture reality is that many novels are poorly written.”

Rothman mentions Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl, the novel recently pulled from publication because it was deemed to have been “seventy-eight per cent A.I.-generated”.  People liked that book.  They still bought and read it, even knowing about AI’s alleged input.  One four-star review from the US talks about “know(ing) the controversy about it, but I put all of that aside… the premise sucked me in right away.”

AI creativity reminds me of an episode of The IT Crowd, in which Moss and Roy (the show’s two computer nerds) try to trick their workmates into thinking a little black box with a blinking light on it is “The Internet”.

If you drop or break that box, they say, you’ll break the entire internet.  Planes will fall out of the sky.  Chaos will reign around the world.

Moss and Roy think this is a great joke, but it falls flat on its face.  Nobody else in the company has their technical knowledge, so they simply believe the story.  They also elevate that useless black box to sacred status, despite Moss and Roy’s desperate assertions that it was all a silly joke.

Working hard on a book, or a painting, or a piece of music, may well imbue it with more depth and quality than something created by AI.  It may not. Regardless, a lot of people won’t notice, and a lot of others won’t care.

I care about books written by AI, because I don’t think books should be written by AI.  Creative skills were already undervalued before AI burst onto the scene.  They’re valued even less now that ChatGPT can write a good-enough story, design a passable logo, and produce a catchy tune in under five minutes’ flat.

Now, fewer people will develop creative skills because they’ll think there’s no point.  They won’t be allowed to create work that isn’t very good, which is how you get better, how you find your original style, and how you become confident in your creative skin.  We’ll all suffer for that.  We should have protected human creativity far more than we have.

As Tolstoy said, “art is one of the means by which people can become united.”   That implies a deep collective sentiment that is inherently, necessarily human.  AI is ruining that: not by not being good enough, but by not being human.

All of this means we’ve got to carry on being creative, in our own unique and special ways.

It’s our human duty.

From a wordy point of view, I hate that people are scared to use em-dashes, or (gasp!) that they’re making mistakes on purpose, lest people confuse their written output with AI’s.  If that’s you, don’t make yourself a worse writer.  Don’t ditch writing altogether, or waste your skills on writing the perfect AI prompt, instead.

Just write what you feel.  Paint what you feel.  Do what Joshua Rothman says in his article about why he keeps on making music, despite not being very good at it.

“I just want to listen out loud to what I hear in my head.”

*I’ve been ditching the calculator recently, because I want to rely on my brain more.  Something about that feels important in these times.  Anyway, I thought doing maths in my head would be cumbersome and horrible.  Instead, I feel a genuine, surprising sense of achievement every time I do a sum.  It’s a feeling I don’t want to lose.