Is AI democratising creativity?

I’m all for AI and automating processes. I’m not creative by nature, so I’m not as protective of my “art” as many talented people would be. But I have to be practical about it, because AI is as much the future as it is the present, and every industry needs to adopt it — or adapt to it — in some form.

 My history in the social media world involved spending a lot of time trying to help clients understand how social platforms democratised the privilege of publishing. Social media created the biggest shift in opening up the sharing of words, thoughts and ideas since the invention of the printing press, which brought literacy to the illiterate. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest gave people with amazing ideas (and sometimes less amazing opinions) a platform to realise and share them.

Let’s be honest — social media has plenty to answer for, like the rise of influencer culture, misinformation and, more recently, the spreading of deepfakes. But its creation meant that the publishing “elite” lost hold over what they deemed “relevant” for the average person.

AI is having a similar impact because of the opportunities it offers in the creative space — not to do the work of creatives but to support them in realising ideas and fleshing out campaigns. It’s not a huge leap to say that AI is helping put greater creativity within reach of the “uncreative”.

What I mean by that is that AI has narrowed the gap between the average person with a good idea but no means to produce a significant body of creative work and those deemed “creatives” who have found their way into places and spaces in which they can express themselves. Whether that body of work is constituted of incredible music, graphic art or scripts, a lot that was previously considered the domain of creative specialists is now open to the world of those with the idea but not the means.

Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, that can be a triggering statement. For creative people who have spent their entire lives honing their craft — such as musicians who worked through endless rewrites of lyrics, spent hours finding the tune and the melody, then put in years touring dingy venues until they made it to the main stage — it’s hard to accept that someone with the kernel of an idea can work with AI to cut out much of that hard legwork and potentially leapfrog you on the path to success.

I want to believe that one of the things that is intrinsic to being human is deep creativity and that machines won’t be able to replicate it. In many ways, the best of our creativity is realised in the irrational, the unpredictable, and the ironic (where computers don’t thrive.) AI can help build on ideas and allow the creator to skip a few steps on the way to a final product.

 Setting up a business is a creative endeavour to some extent, so let’s see if I can illustrate my point about creativity and AI. Say you’re setting up an ice cream stand and you find that you’re regularly over- or understocked — meaning that sales are on a rollercoaster of low vs high — and you want to figure out why. You gain the insight that sales are linked to the temperature. You map that on a spreadsheet and get Copilot to draw you a graph.

The result is a “hockey stick” graph that shows how many ice creams you sell as the temperature progresses from 20°C, to 24°C and then to 26°C and 30°C. The machine is helping you interpret the information you have at hand.

The problem is when you ask the machine to extrapolate that data to help you figure out what your stock levels should be. It will extrapolate that temperature trend upwards and downwards as far as it can go and believe it’s done a good job, because it’s worked out a data stream based on the information you fed it.

It doesn’t know that humans are unlikely to be around if the temperature drops below -20°C or rises above 50°C. It can tell you how much stock you’ll need to have, but it doesn’t know that the human body won’t survive extremes of temperature, let alone crave ice cream at temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun.

 The way to apply AI, then, is what I call goal-directed adaptive computing (to borrow from Daniel Hulme’s thinking). If we can focus AI on a defined goal, it can deliver and help us shift from an obsession with a future where computers will do what people can do to the idea that we can use computers to liberate us to do what we do well.

 In the creative world, the quality of work produced is highly dependent on the quality of the brief received — and AI is no different. To create successful creative work, you need to understand the audience, what the product or service is that you’re trying to inform them about, how it can affect their lives and h what success looks like.

When we receive the result, we consider it against the brief and decide whether it is fit for purpose. The middle bit is where the grunt work happens — and that’s where AI can come in to help people. It can’t work without a brief and its output can’t be judged without an understanding of what the starting point was.

 AI is not a replacement for thinking. It’s great at opening up avenues you may not have considered, but it’s also giving you information based on what it knows — which is work that has already been created and information that has already been shared.

That’s how it can help inspire people to create — and I can think of few better things for humanity than more creativity: more paintings, more music, more graphic art, more books or more movies. 

 Mike Stopforth is the managing director of Flume Digital Marketing

 The big take-out: AI is not a replacement for thinking but it is great at opening up avenues you may not have considered.