The Dystopia of Creativity

I am turning 40 this week, and so I was looking for a flourless chocolate cake recipe. A recipe that looked just my kid of thing popped up on Facebook. The image on Facebook was a bit different to the one in the post, and something seemed off about the ingredients images, and then I realised what was going on. This who recipe blog was AI. The ‘baker’ an AI avatar, the recipes written by AI and all the photos AI generated. It was done in such a typical food blogger style, you could easily miss it.

As I hit 40 and reflect on my creativity and business over the years, I can’t help by wonder where on earth we are going right now. Why are we giving away our humanness, our creativity, our unique way of creating and thinking all to a machine. Does everything lose it’s meaning along the way, what even is the point of it all if no human was behind it.

Didn’t we all start blogs to connect with one another across the globe, share our thoughts and ideas and learn from one another? And now its reduced to ‘how can I do the least work and make money?’. Where is the connection, expression or joy in that?

Then I saw an AD for creating a digital mail club using AI written stories and illustrations. Mail clubs became a trend because people were looking for human connection and real human art. And yet here we are hijacking something special and using AI to reduce it to meaningless money making.

Like any technology or tool, it has it’s place. AI can be incredibly helpful and for research and science has the ability to help in incredible ways.And yes it can help with productivity, bringing ideas to life that you wouldn’t normally have the skill or resources to build and to help you get unstuck when you are struggling for an idea or solution. I’m not anti-AI (I can see a lot of good use cases for it, and I use it myself for various tasks) but in the race to go all out with AI I think we need to take a step back, slow down and ask some questions. I don’t think we are really assessing the impact of where we are headed. Do we really want to outsource all our human creativity and our visual world to a machine with no emotions or feelings?

Do we want a world designed by one source, that all starts to look and feel the same and feels strangely un-wordly and disconnected? Does human creativity matter beyond commerce? Does it have greater meaning and value then just selling?

The real problem is a culture that values virality over craft, quantity over quality, and money over meaning. - Esther Uwanah Edet

When creativity, be it art, design or writing all come from a robot, does it really have any meaning or value anymore? What is the purpose? It’s not to create connection, share our ideas or express ourselves or find community. So all it seems to boil down to is making money and cutting out the human connection in the process. To me that seems very joyless and disconnecting.

"AI art skips the deeply human process... The idea is to honor the years of practice, skill and creativity that artists put into their work." — Anonymous Gallery Owner, Delhi

Have you seen those Chinese drop shipping ads? They make very realistic AI video sob stories about someone hand crafting a product and crying about people rejecting them and not wanting their beautiful handiwork. However as amazing as the product looks, all you’ll get in the mail is a cheap item from China. I also saw a small business selling hydration powder recently make an AI ad and it was so weird as it felt really off brand for them. Then I think of the AI build recipe site I mentioned earlier. When AI imitates small business, handmade and home baked it all feels very strange.

What is real? Are we now left questioning everything? If something is amazing are we left wondering if its all just fake? How do we discern human creativity and craftsmanship from a convincing AI dupe?

Did you forget who you are?

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Jun 4

There is a small business I have loved and supported for years. For a long time I had a great sense of who they are. But this year they started making soulless, made up avatar, completely disconnected from who they are videos on Tiktok. It felt so weird to watch and like they had lost their way.

It’s often recommended to the elderly to find activities that use their brain to keep them young, keep their brain healthy and live longer. So what happens when even young people begin to outsource thinking and stop using their brains?

what kind of person are we creating who has never had a moment of true creativity or struggled to find an idea? It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this. AI doesn’t give, it takes. It takes the creative and intelligent output of humans, mashes it up, and spits it out. - sujato

We see it already. People who have to turn to Chatgpt to make decisions and get through the day instead of thinking for themselves. While it may seem laughable and silly now, if we are not careful this is how the future could look. Our brains begin to shrink as we use them less and less and we lose our ability to make decisions, think, imagine and create. Our lives become dictated by what the robot tells us to do. Is that not a bit frightening? Not only because we are outsourcing our thinking but also because we don’t know the impact on our brain health.

Will I be that grumpy old lady yelling ‘you don’t need that, use your own brain?’

"I want AI to do laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." — Unknown | Viral Social Media Sentiment

I know AI has been around for years now. I know people will say to stop complaining, AI is here so deal with it. Stop being an old grump! I have witnessed a lot of change in my life. From computers becoming more mainstream in the home, to the internet, e-commerce, youtube, email, social media. I watched it all appear and our lives change and adapt to the new technologies. But there is something different about this.

It’s not simply ‘just a tool’. It can be, but I fear we are allowing it to be more then that and that’s my concern.

Right now I am feeling a bit lost. What do people actually need from a creative right now? Do they want my thinking? My designs? My unique style? Me to build AI tools based on my skill and knowledge? or for me to just disappear because I’m not even needed anymore?

Is this the midlife crisis of a creative millennial? Trying to find where my creative skill still fits into this bizarre new system?