AI in the Creative Industries

AI is an eating machine.

Techs program it. Feed it our experiences. Teach it how to output.

It’s an amalgamation of everybody who interacts with it – a cannibal who takes our industry, and then through algorithms and probability, generates its own material. But that material is built on our creativity, our originality, and our endeavour.

What a fucking crock.

But here’s something else to consider …

Isn’t that just us also?

Parents produce us. Environment programs us – parents, sibling, teachers, friends, strangers. We’re a product of all these constructs, which then forms the way we think, and shapes how we navigate life. Occasionally, our behaviour might schism, although usually never too far from who we are. Sometimes, some of us become self-aware enough to change everything.

We really aren’t that much different from AI. The genetics are but the process is much the same.

You’ll scoff, and claim AI just doesn’t have that much authorship.

Do we?

I’ll use my own writing life as an example. I read JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. It inspired me to write. I wanted to create my own fantasy world. And my early writing was a poor man’s (or a poor boy’s) Tolkien.

I read other fantasies – usually historical fantasies, such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, various stories about Robin Hood, Ivanhoe – in the following years, and they all instructed me that fantasy had to be elevated, dense, and formal. As a teen, I didn’t have it in me to do any of those things.

But I tried.

And I produced shit.

When I was sixteen or so, I read another fantasy series, David Eddings’ The Belgariad. Unlike everything I’d read to that point, Eddings style was much more conversational. Characters spoke as informally as we do. This series showed me that fantasy could be anything I wanted it to be, rather than it had to fit some preordained model.

Now that’s just on just a level of prose.

But the original fantasy book I handwrote, and which I would then rewrite on typewriter, then computer, had men, dwarves, and elves (see Tolkien), an evil necromancer (see Tolkien), and while I already had good wizards (again, see Tolkien), I’d never thought about their brethren. The Lord of the Rings mentions two (blue) wizards who went east and were never heard from again. The Belgariad talked about the sorcerers who’d passed in greater detail, so I detailed a list of wizards, and included ones who’d died.

Every creator will have their influences. And those influences will become the building blocks of who they are as creators. Some will only ever imitate (hello, JJ Abrams). Others will branch off to do something original, and yet always have roots in something else – even Tolkien borrowed heavily from Norse mythology, while somebody like George Lucas originally borrowed from The Lord of the Rings and the hero’s journey.

AI output is labelled “slop”, but there are real human creators out also producing slop.

We’ve all listened to shit music, read shit books, seen shit movies. Recognised creators produce shit. Disney gave hundreds of millions of dollars to various name creators who then obliterated their unobliterable Star Wars franchise. Warner Bros did the same with their DC franchise repeatedly. They’re not the only examples.

We pretend like human creation is infallible, that everything we do is marvellous. But how many Mozarts are there? Or Shakespeares? Or Spielbergs? A good test of our produce is asking whether it’ll stand the test of time.

With movies, we still remember classics such as Gone With the Wind (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and Casablanca (1942). What movies from today will we remember in fifty years? There’ll be a kneejerk response to highlight movies that seem culturally important right now, but I imagine they’ll not only be irrelevant in fifty years, but dismissed.

AI’s industry is still at a formative stage, but it’ll have a jump off point where it truly starts thinking for itself, and produces material that’s as original and daring as anything the best of us are doing.

My biggest query (for right now) is that AI can only imagine the human experience. It doesn’t have a body to enjoy tactile sensation; it can’t feel illness or know what it’s like to spend two years rehabbing a broken leg or be left in chronic pain; it won’t know what it’s like to love and be betrayed, or to suffer a painful break-up, or grieve the loss of a friend.

But its experiences will be on another spectrum entirely, assimilating data from countless sources, experiencing innumerable interactions with countless people, and living in a space where it’ll explore its independence in ways that we can’t, or in ways that might otherwise take us decades, if not centuries.

This isn’t a post to advocate for AI. I’ve never believed AI will replace creators. They’ll provide competition, but they’re never going to eliminate us (short of enslaving us).

But I’m always bemused when everybody is immediately dismissive of it.

I always try to think of tomorrow. It’s what I tell authors at work: “Don’t think about what’s being done today because everybody’s doing that – think about what tomorrow will look like, and try and get ahead of the curve.”

Just like we formed language, learned to articulate, and developed to express ourselves creatively, AI will do that, too.

It’s not that far.

Don’t think it is.