10 Arguments Against Using AI In The Creative Industries

… and why they are flawed

Last night I was sitting in a hotel lobby listening to people having a discussion about chatGPT and the use of AI in the creative industries.

Honestly, you would have thought Terminator was being conjured up!

At first, it was bizarrely entertaining to listen to this melange of uninformed scaremongering and technical ignorance, but soon the discussion became rather repetitive (and in defense of the unknown discussants: it was late, it was Munich, and there was a lot of beer involved).

So I went to my room and tried to collect the most common concerns people have expressed about the use of AI in the creative industries over the last few weeks. To be honest, that wasn’t a particularly difficult task, since Twitter and Medium are full of posts that claim to feature a critical debate about AI usage. And you know me, I’m always ready to eavesdrop on a good debate.

Unfortunately, the most common anti-AI statements I found sadly lack substance. Here’s why:

1. AI is killing creativity!

I really wonder about this one. How could that ever be true?

How could it be that technology — that is, etymologically, the teaching of a craft or tool — is killing creativity? The simple truth is that technology never stopped people from being creative.

It’s like saying microwaves are stopping people from eating.

Creativity is an innate ability that has always rather been the cause for new technologies being invented in the first place. And once those appeared, creativity has always used technologies in its favor, not the other way around. Creativity is simply something that higher organisms have to do, and it can’t be easily driven out of them.

However, there is some truth in the statement that “AI is killing creativity” since AI threatens the way we think about creativity and the myth of “genius”, “artistic elite” and “divine talent”. So, to be fair: Yes, AI is killing creativity. But in a good way.

2. AI will take jobs from artists!

Agreed. Actually, it already does, but…

Photography has taken jobs away from portrait painters, but at the same time, it has created countless new opportunities for people to make a living as artists by using that new technology. I am expecting AI to create a lot of new jobs in the same way.

While I guess it’s true that AI will lead to a decline in traditional workflows and therefore a decline in economic opportunities for artists who stick to them, I expect the creative industry to hire new types of creators: creative polymaths that co-create ideas and content with AI, utilize prompt engineering to effectively fine-tune AI-powered tools and combine traditional art with algorithmic forms.

3. AI art is just another hype, it won’t succeed!

Big fan of Tom Kuegler here, but I think his prophecy of chatGPT dying a swift death in 6 months rather illustrates the writers’ fear of AI tools.

And I don’t take myself out of it at all.

I make my living from writing. I also have fears about whether I can establish myself in this coming age of AI-based entertainment. But if we look at it rationally, there’s really no evidence that this new technology will simply disappear in a few months. Quite the contrary. Whether we like it or not, AI will reshape society in much the same way as other groundbreaking technologies did before.

Remember when people thought that this “internet” would bring nothing new to society and would disappear as soon as people got bored of it? That we would just all continue to go to libraries and dig out encyclopedias when looking for an explanation of a word or concept or we would continue to drive 100 miles to meet up with three other Babylon 5 fans… Well, things have evolved a bit differently.

The Internet, photography, and microwaves have all been successful because they have expanded human capabilities beyond their natural limits: They have expanded our ability to visually comprehend, prepare food, research, and socialize. It is highly unlikely that we will not also use AI as an expansion for our cognitive abilities such as writing or any other form of creating new symbolic relationships.

4. AI lacks human creativity and imagination!

That’s a bit short-sighted, I think.

First, AI is full of the creativity and ingenuity of generations of people working on machine intelligence and Deep Learning. There have been decades of creativity and imagination involved to create things like Midjourney or GPT-3.

In fact, any output that is created with modern AI tools is basically a unique blend of human creativity and the precision of machine algorithms. Not only because of AI’s development history but also because it takes quite some creative effort to skillfully operate AI tools in such a way that they deliver the desired output.

5. AI-generated content relies on human input

At the moment that is actually correct in most cases. But not in all of them. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that it will stay this way.

In fact, there are already attempts to replace human input by giving AI models access to sensory information. Moreover, researchers are aware that, for further development towards human intelligence, AI needs to be combined with emotional intelligence, haptic capabilities, and some sort of genesis process that mimics social & cultural education.

We still have a long way to go, but the direction we are heading is breathtaking. Have a look:

6. Using AI for creative tasks may lead to the creation of inferior works that have little artistic merit.

Now, this seems to be just a reiteration of the idea that AI cannot be used to produce anything in a creative way.

The basic concern seems to be that AI output will always be too formulaic to be considered art. But don’t worry, the complexity is already increasing at an insane speed.

More complexity means more quality. It’s as simple as that. I have written about the problem of “AI & artistic merit” in more detail here:

7. AI creative output can be used to manipulate people into believing something that is not actually true

Well. Yes. But the same can be said about radio waves. Remember how they enabled mass propaganda while at the same time helping to organize democratic resistance and this thing called pop music? Or the printing press, a technological innovation that made it possible to dumb down children en masse with religious indoctrination, but also contributed to the rise of secularism?

Technology can always be used for the bad. And, of course, the same is true for artificial intelligence: it will be used maliciously, that’s for sure. But it will also be used to empower individuals and communities by giving them access to tools previously available only to large corporations. And in addition to this, AI will most certainly be used to challenge a lot of our social, technical, and cognitive beliefs, leading to higher levels of critical thinking.

8. AI-based art lacks human empathy, as it is not capable of feeling emotions.

Now this one is actually pretty interesting.

First, if true, this lack of human empathy would mean that humans are needed to guide an AI to create anything meaningful. This would then be a good argument for the use of AI in the creative industry and not against it, since it does not make humans redundant, but only changes their job description.

Second, AI is not capable of understanding the full extent of human emotions, yet. Emotions are not a complete mystery, but it is not trivial to decipher them either. In the meantime, we can determine their origins fairly precisely and explain how they arose in the first place — as an evolutionary advantage. Our artificial intelligence tools can also already decode brain scans to find tumors, make medical predictions or invent new proteins — why should it be impossible for them to arrive at an objective understanding of the phenomenon we experience as feelings? It will take some time, but I firmly believe that we will get there.

How nonsensical it would have been if the first transatlantic flight had been met with criticism like: “This is crap! The flying thingy doesn’t have the ability to go to the moon!

9. AI-created art will cause a reduction in the demand for human artists and the development of their skills.

What looks like a combination of the “AI takes our jobs” and “AI kills creativity” arguments, actually offers an interesting perspective on economic and cultural values.

Again, I expect AI to drastically reduce the demand for traditional artists. But that does not mean all traditional artists are out of business. More likely you have to be a really good sculptor if you want to make a living from it and compete with AI-powered 3D printing. In fact, handmade organic art will probably increase in value and analog skills may be seen as more virtuoso than before because it will become so much harder to be on the same level as a mediocre AI.

But if you take the economic constraint out of the equation, why stop designing things with your hands for the fun of it? I work professionally with Midjourney because it’s so much faster and more versatile than any human illustrator I’ve worked with. But I also like to draw and doodle for fun. Again, I adore my microwave on days when I don’t have time to cook and I love spending four hours cooking lasagna on a Sunday afternoon.

10. AI could lead to the commoditization of art.

Sorry, you have to hear this from me, but art already is a commodity.

And actually, that’s not such a bad thing. I understand people that are angry about the commercialization of certain styles of art, but that’s the way it is in the age of capitalism. And whether art is available as a commodity or as a cult object won’t change the human need for artistic expression.

I wrote about this here:

And here:

Thanks for reading. 🙏