As a journalist I’m used to listening to my peers talk about a job-nabbing bogeyman called “technology.” Craigslist killed local newspapers; Twitter killed magazines. What’s new, these days, is that the bitter chorus has grown: I hear from animators, musicians, screenwriters, illustrators – all of them gulping and wondering where their value now resides. Every content creator has joined the collective chagrin.
However, in our anger and fear, are we missing something? New technologies have a way of teaching us about ourselves, if we let them. They are always, after all, extensions of human will. And so, though the advent of generative AI may well be destructive – it could also illuminate a mystery about the origin of our creativity.
The notion that creativity comes from inside the artist is a fantasy well-suited to our individualist age. Artists and consumers co-create this fantasy, preferring to believe that books and songs have a precious value derived from their singular origin. But there are other theories. Consider the ancient idea of the “muse,” for example; a mysterious external force visits the artist and graces them with inspiration.
When their cancellation roars through social media, though, when the thief is caught, there’s only one moral option for other creatives. We must throw a tomato, too . Otherwise, the transgression could taint us. Otherwise, the myth of the unique and magical artist would be muddied. But these cases raise such ire precisely because every artist and writer knows, on a gut level, that they do copy, that they do take, that they do pass off vintage notions as their own.
We creatives are scared of AI offerings not because they are “cheats,” but because they are learning to do our jobs in far less time and at far less cost.