The future of human creativity in an AI world

I’ve been thinking about the potential consequences of a world where our text and image generating AI is as good as, or better than, the best humans.

Over the past couple of years we’ve seen AI improve greatly at both image and text generation. While it can’t yet – and may never – reach the level of the best humans in any discipline, it’s not hard to imagine a future where it has.

With the state of things today, AI can already be used as an augmenting tool for human work. An artist might generate an AI image and edit that into exactly what’s wanted, rather than working from scratch. A writer might write their own text but take some editing suggestions from the AI. Already today, we have to wonder if images and writing are human-made.

In a world where AI is slightly better than the best humans at these things, without our help to get there, the tool becomes more like a parent. But an intelligent AI parent will always be available to help, and will always be better than the child. There’s no impending moment of ‘leaving home’ that we’re training for.

A popular sentiment is that we’ll still seek out human art because we desire that spark of humanity, the meaning behind a work that comes from a life lived. But on the Internet, anyone can lie. For now, it’s often possible to pick out AI images and text simply from the look and the tone, but there’s no special watermark. While benevolent actors may add one, we cannot make one that’s impossible to remove.

An artist releasing “real, human, no AI used” content in that world will be competing against other “real, human, no AI used” content that secretly did get help from AI. In fact, I’m sure we already live in that world to some extent, and smarter AI will only make the problem worse.

Say you decide to write a poem. You might want to do this purely for yourself, to express something meaningful on paper. The best art usually doesn’t have a target audience anyway, because catering to an audience always bounds the art within the desires of that audience. But it still feels a little demotivating to know that you could always get an even better poem if you told the AI your thoughts and asked it to write one. It still feels a little demotivating that if you share the poem, nobody can be sure that you wrote it on your own.

I suppose the latter has always been the case to some extent, with ghost writers and mentors and so on. But doing it yourself was still more believable, then. Funny that in a world where a superintelligence could solve our technological problems, it might also bring a feeling of pointlessness to our renewed free time for creativity.

A few predictions, if creative AI continues to improve:

  • We will see an increased focus on areas where AI is weaker, therefore giving implicit proof of human creation. Physical work like sculpture. New formats for poetry and music, because even an AI that excels at those tends to have trouble creating something truly new – sticking close to the forms of the content it was trained on.
  • New types of generative art will emerge that specifically work alongside AI. I’m not sure how these might look yet.
  • There will be scandals – “Artist exposed using AI” YouTube videos etc – and plenty more passing their work off as human that aren’t caught. Some doing everything with AI, some only getting a little polish from it.
  • “Verified human” chat communities won’t really exist, as even a “verified” person can simply turn around and use AI anyway. But for artwork there will be a great increase in showing in-progress photos and/or video of your work, as the only way to really prove it’s human made.
  • Art as an economic pursuit may be all but obliterated, but that will never stop art being made. No artist makes art purely for money.
  • There will be many who use AI (openly or otherwise) even when they’d rather do without, and people will ask them why they’re railing against AI while also using it, in the same way they ask environmentalists why they took a flight, or anti-consumerists why they own a smartphone, or people asking for higher taxes why they don’t just pay more tax; and always the answer will be the same: That it would put them at a disadvantage to everyone else. So you look for systemic change at a higher level, but then a whole group becomes disadvantaged to the rest of the world, and people will work around it anyway, and good luck getting the whole world on board with reversing something once Pandora’s box is open.

I showed Claude 3.5 Sonnet, (a general-purpose LLM AI from Anthropic) this article and asked if it would like to write a short poem based on it. Here it is, unedited:

In the Gallery of Tomorrow

The finest brush now paints in code
Each pixel perfect, neatly stowed.
Our children’s children might not see
The worth in imperfection’s plea.

Yet in these spaces between machine and mind
In cracks algorithms cannot find
We plant our gardens, wild and free,
Knowing they could grow more perfectly.

For what is beauty, if not the way
We choose to fail a little more each day,
Reaching past the perfect light
For something real enough to write?

Obscure Steam games and digging for Hidden Gems

Every now and then someone makes the argument that all really good games eventually do well, otherwise “if there are really good games that don’t sell, how come I never come across one?”

That argument is always refuted by the statement that of course you don’t come across games that are obscure, by definition. Which is itself then easy to refute by saying yeah, but surely you’d still come across one occasionally if you went looking.

Let’s go looking.

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The Maintenance Of Everyday Things

The manual for my cordless jug tells me I must switch off the power lever before lifting it from its cradle. It doesn’t tell me why. When I lift it off, the lever actually returns itself to zero automatically. What might happen if I do it “wrong”, how bad is it, and how likely? Some engineer knows somewhere.

When Aunt Magda comes to visit and decides to make tea, will she perform this step? Highly unlikely. I guess I’m supposed to tell everyone who uses the jug, or request they read the manual. Heaven forbid someone buys it second-hand without the manual, or just doesn’t read it. I’ve lifted it without switching the level off once or twice; if something terrible happened I didn’t notice.

I have no information to go on for how important this is, and it’s a theme I see everywhere. Information on use and maintenance in the manual provided is often overly strict and thorough – seemingly designed to remove all liability and responsibility from the maker, not to mention sometimes wrong or applying to some subtly different product.

We have a problem as a society with not explaining why, from teaching maths to superstition. This is just one symptom of that problem.

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The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock

I want to talk about the Nokia N9 alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it. There are more important things in life than getting excited about an alarm clock app, but it’s nice when simple things are done well.

I don’t know how many of these ideas are borrowed from previous apps (the N9 is contemporary with the iPhone 4S), but either way it’s implemented exceptionally well.

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