AI and the Democratization of Creativity
While my last two articles may have seemed as if I was just messing around on the computer—OK, I was sort of except… I wasn’t. At least not totally. What I was trying to do was learn how Claude.ai works. I’ve been reading Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI after I heard Mollick being interviewed by Ezra Klein on his podcast. Mollick suggests that it takes 10 hours of experimentation to figure out an AI platform, so that’s what I’m doing, and I thought it might be fun to tell you about it. (If you’re interested in a less frivolous exploration of Audre Lorde’s essay—a “conversation” between me [pretending to be an uncomfortable white, heterosexual male undergrad] and Claude [as an articulate college professor known for being able to explain difficult ideas to undergrads], I’ve put the transcript here.
In another of Klein’s podcast episodes entitled “Will AI Break the Internet? Or Save It?” Klein worries (I’ve come to the conclusion that Ezra Klein is a professional fretter), like a lot of other “creatives,” that AI is going to make human creativity (and him) irrelevant when AI is able to do what he does faster and cheaper. He mentions that he did an experiment in which he trained an AI using a bunch of his own essays, and then he gave the AI a specific topic and instructed it to write an essay using Klein’s style. The result made Klein more than a little nervous. And it’s not just Klein: one of the major sticking points of the Hollywood writers’ strike last year was about the use of AI.
In an article in The Guardian entitled “How Hollywood Writers Triumphed Over AI—and Why It Matters,” Dani Anguiano and Lois Beckett wrote, “One of the most closely watched aspects of negotiations was the use of artificial intelligence, amid concerns from both writers and actors that unchecked AI could dramatically reshape Hollywood and undermine their roles, pitting artists against robots in a battle over human creativity.” The authors summarized, “Observers hail a ‘smart’ deal that allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement.” (emphasis added)
That last sentence could have come directly from Mollick’s book, in which he argues that AI is a collaborator, not a solo creator out to steal (most of our) our jobs. In fact, he provides a lot of evidence that AI isn’t all that great at creative writing (especially humor, which seems to be confined to really bad Dad Jokes), but what it IS good at is generating ideas. “So how should we use AI to help generate ideas?,” Mollick asks. “When you do include AI in idea generation, you should expect that most of its ideas will be mediocre. But that’s okay—that’s where you, as a human, come into the equation. You are looking for ideas that spark inspiration and recombination, and having a long list of generated possibilities can be an easier place to start for people who are not great at coming up with ideas on their own.” [me again with the emphasis]
Recombination is a Hollywood superpower. There is an old story that the film Alien was pitched as “Jaws in space.” This is an example of recombination—a mashup of two disparate ideas. Speed was “Die Hard on a bus.” Waterworld was “Mad Max in water.” Mollick says “LLMs [Large Language Models—i.e., ChatGPT and Claude”] are connection machines.” They can generate a list of such ideas endlessly. So, of course, I asked ChatGPT to provide me with some movie ideas using the “Jaws in space” model. Claude had several ideas at the tip of his fingertips:
"Home Alone" in a space station - A young tech prodigy gets accidentally left behind on a nearly deserted space station and uses her ingenuity to fend off space pirates trying to steal a powerful energy source.
"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" meets "Westworld" - A high schooler skips school for the adventure of a lifetime in a fully immersive, historical virtual reality park, but things take a turn when the AI starts to malfunction, trapping him and his friends in a dangerously realistic ancient Rome.
"Jurassic Park" with mythical creatures - Scientists bring mythical creatures like dragons, griffins, and phoenixes to life and create a theme park on a remote island, but when the security systems fail, a group of visitors must survive in a world where fantasy has become dangerously real.
"Ocean's Eleven" meets "The Martian" - A team of astronauts and engineers must pull off the most daring heist in history: stealing invaluable minerals from a heavily guarded mining colony on Mars to prevent a corporate conglomerate from monopolizing the solar system's resources.
"Indiana Jones" in the digital world - An archaeologist specializing in ancient languages is sucked into a digital realm where historical and mythical worlds converge. To escape, she must solve puzzles and recover artifacts while outsmarting digital entities based on historical figures.
"Moby-Dick" in outer space - The captain of a space vessel becomes obsessed with hunting down a mysterious and elusive alien creature that destroyed his former ship, leading his crew on a dangerous and potentially futile quest across the galaxy.
"The Great Gatsby" with AI - In a future society where AI has achieved consciousness, a mysterious and wealthy AI hosts lavish parties in its mansion, hiding a tragic love story and a desire to be understood and accepted as human.
"Pirates of the Caribbean" in the sky - Adventurers and pirates navigate floating islands and airborne ships in search of a legendary realm that promises treasure and secrets of the old world, battling the elements, rival pirates, and creatures of the sky.
Mollick was right: most of these are dreadful (although I kind of liked #3). But if you’re stuck for an idea, bouncing them off of an AI is better than nothing. Mollick did a hilarious experiment in which he “asked AI to: Find me business ideas that would incorporate fast food, patent 6,604,835 B2 [which turned out to be for a lava lamp that included bits of crystal], and 14th century England. It suggested: ‘A medieval-themed fast-food restaurant that serves burgers, fries, and shakes in a castle-like setting, with staff dressed as knights, princesses, and jesters. The restaurant could use patent 6,604,835 B2 to create decorative lava lamps with gems or coins floating in them, to add some sparkle and ambiance to the dining area. The lava lamps could also be sold as souvenirs or gifts to customers. This idea could appeal to families with children, history buffs, or anyone looking for a fun and unique dining experience.’” White Castle in a 60s dorm room!
The thing is, though—and it should calm down all the creatives at least a little—AI is trained on existing material, so it isn’t really very good at true originality. I can understand why Hollywood writers might be concerned—Hollywood is mostly formulaic—but if the writers are using AI themselves, well, we can certainly look forward to “Ocean’s Eleven meets The Martian” sometime in the future.
While I sympathize with the anxiety writers, artists, and illustrators are feeling—none of us want to lose our jobs—at the same time, I see AI as possessing the ability to democratize creativity, which I see as a positive. Klein sees the message of the AI medium (ala Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”) as artists being told “you’re not so special,” which I guess is one way to look at it. But such pearl clutching, at root, is about keeping the creative gates closed so that people keep buying stories or pictures rather than creating them themselves, which is good for capitalism, for sure, and for the artists. But is it good for our society? In “Will AI Break the Internet? Or Save It?,” Nilay Patel (the interviewee) gives Klein an example of a use of AI that really made me think differently about this issue.
He imagines a father who uses the art generator “Midjourney” to create a picture of a shark coming out of a truck in a tornado (Sharknado meets Speed?), and the father proudly tells him that he used the picture to tell his kid a bedtime story based on the picture. In other words, the father is empowered to use his own imagination. While Shucknado doesn’t seem like a particularly great story to me, I can imagine parents creating their own children’s books to, perhaps, explain something that is happening in the family—maybe that Grandma is sick, or that Dad lost his job, or just a funny story about something that happened at the dinner table last night. Then I imagine the same parent making five pictures and giving them to their 6-year-old with the instruction that they should use them to create a story that the kid can tell the parent that evening. Now the 6-year-old is being creative! Beats watching The Lion King for the 76th time.
I am reminded of what theater-maker David Diamond wrote in his book Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue:
“Theatre, like all other forms of cultural expression, used to be ordinary people singing, dancing, telling stories. This was the way a living community recorded and celebrated its victories, defeats, joys, fears. As the Cartesian or mechanistic model took root, and later as colonialism spread across the planet, coinciding with the mechanization of capitalism, this primal activity of storytelling also evolved in a mechanistic way. Like many other things we can think of, cultural activity became commodified. It transformed from something that people did naturally 'in community', into a manufactured consumer product. Today a vast majority of people buy theatre buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc., to tell our own stories about our collective selves?
What is the result of the living community's inability to use primal language to tell its own stories? Alienation, violence, self-destructive behaviour on a global level. Living communities have fallen into a stupor, hypnotized by a steady diet of manufactured culture."
So yes, perhaps AI will negatively affect artists in some ways—I suspect online clip art businesses will gradually be replaced by DALL-E and Midjourney, for instance—but it might also lead to an increase in the level of creativity in the population as a whole, potentially making the arts more personalized and more local while allowing regular people to experience the joy of creating something for themselves, about themselves, with each other.
That seems to me to be a trade worth considering.