The term “buzzword” strikes me as not being strong enough by far to express the way in which everything
related to artificial intelligence/AI is being hyped and peddled these days.
Little wonder, if one looks at literally billions of dollars being thrown at potential new investment opportunities,
often based on highly questionable assumptions.
Leaving aside the abysmally rotten state of ethical responsibility in this context, I cannot but stumble over the many instances where heralds of the new revolution also promise to somehow improve creativity itself.
Whilst I can absolutely see the great potential of ethically curated image and video generation tools to help make previsualisation and short form video production much more efficient, I do not believe that any type of quantitative streamlining can help us improve creativity itself.
A part of me feels that it’s almost blasphemous to claim one could improve something as sacred as the amorphous and ungraspable notion that is creativity.
Being creative takes so many shapes and forms and is so intimately tied up with our awareness of the present moment, that it’s impossible to pinpoint and reduce it to a numerical value IMHO without missing the importance of the journey aspect of any creative process.
Conversely, if one doesn’t reduce creativity to a measurable quantity, like e.g. the difference of buying four or five apples at your local supermarket, how could one claim to somehow grow/enhance or expand it?
Scribbling with a pencil for hours, mulling over a particular image or sentence, dissecting and reassembling it countless times can all be acts of creativity that are complete in and of themselves. The creative nature of one’s actions does not increase or decrease if one is an active agent of creativity.
I am of course not blind to the fact that the pipeline of producing visible or audible results that are somehow based on creative input can be drastically improved, but I am convinced that dedicating oneself to such glittering crutches can have negative long-term effects on the ability to stand on one’s own two creative feet, metaphorically speaking. In actual fact, many AI tools may make us feel as if running 100 meters in under ten seconds had never been easier, when in fact they will lead to more creative muscle atrophy in the long term, if we are not very very careful.