AI, creativity, and the “ideas guy”
I haven’t paid much attention to the developments happening in AI. I know people who are incredible pessimistic about it, who think that human intelligence won’t be important for much longer, and that AI will replace most workers and humanity won’t have much of a purpose in the future. I also know people who think that AI is the most important technology that’s being developed right now and that it will determine which nations become the next global superpowers.
My attitude is that if either of those things are true, I can do very little about it. I also feel that the addition of AI into all products and services as added value is a fad that most people don’t appreciate, and that creative products made with AI are not positively received. My personal experience with the technology is that it’s a tool with a lot of limitations, especially when it comes to producing creative work.
What a generative LLM is is a word-prediction machine. It’s trained to guess the statistically likely next word based on training data it has scraped mainly from from the open web. The output is as average and expected as possible, because that’s what a word-prediction machine does: produce expected words. The patterns that LLMs write with make me cringe:
“It’s not just X, it’s Y”,
Unmotivated information regurgitation,
Trite and cheesy conclusions that grasp for impact.
I feel like I can generally detect when something is written with AI, and it makes my eyes immediately glaze over.
Additionally, AI-generated images make my eyes hurt. Maybe AI images will get to a point where they are indistinguishable from real photos in the near future, I don’t know. But what’s being produced by the models now is hard to look at. Apparently, younger generations are more adept at spotting AI images than older ones.
All that to say, when it comes to images and words produced by AI, I’m not very impressed.
That brings me to a different topic: the “ideas guy”. I expect most creative people have met an ideas guy: a person who doesn’t have any creative skills, but is convinced that their ideas are golden. They think that you, the person with the pencil or camera or guitar in your hand, are an ideas-realizer, and the quality of a creative product is dependent on the “creative ideas” that are fed into the process at the start.
What I find that these people don’t understand, is that initial ideas are not worth much on their own. Being able to execute, to overcome creative obstacles, to adjust, to develop, to complete something — that is where the challenge is, where the value is. A creative process includes a million tiny microdecisions. What word should I use here, what colour should this be, how much space do I include between these elements, etc., etc. The ideas guy has no insight into this since they don’t participate in the process of creating. That’s why people who don’t work on creative projects are much more likely to believe that initial ideas are what’s important.
It’s like that story about the photography professor (Jerry Uelsmann) dividing his class into two groups, one half being graded on the quantity of photos they submitted over the semester, one graded on the quality of a single photo they submitted. Purportedly, all the best photos came from the quantity side of the class, because they were the people actively engaged in the practice of taking photos. People that are doing are always going to outstrip those that are supposing, planning, calibrating.
The availability of AI tools has, to me, proven that the initial idea isn’t where the value of a creative product lies. With these generative AI tools, the ideas guys can just now execute all their brilliant ideas without needing any creative skills. If the creative process just a barrier to producing these brilliant ideas, then now that barrier is eliminated. That means we will be able to see much more brilliance in our creative outputs, won’t we? People should love all this novel AI generated content, shouldn’t they?
But that has not been what’s happened at all. The term people use when talking about AI-generated content is slop. People don’t appreciate the soulless outputs that are assembled by machine, no matter what brilliant prompts they have been made with. That’s because the idea is not the soul of the art; the process is.