A non-definitive guide to AI and creativity
An article about why, this time, video will not kill the radio star.
An acquaintance of mine, also an author, once told me, half-joking, that I should stop encouraging people to write; there were already too many authors on the market, competing for too few readers.
I happen to disagree, for two reasons:
There are a lot of people out there with life experiences that go beyond anything that others ever imagine, and most of those people are not writing those stories down. I know this for a fact because I have listened, with amazement, to many incredible tales, most of which will be forgotten with time. Some of the people who are the “owners” of these stories (who have lived or imagined them) are simply not interested in writing, and that’s okay. But many think that they can’t write or that their stories are irrelevant, and that’s kind of sad.
Not all writing needs to be “on the market”, or to generate a living income for the writer. In fact, there are certain upsides to having what some people call a day job.
I have been both self-employed and conventionally employed, and I enjoy greater creative freedom when my income comes from other sources than my creative work. The problem is, of course, finding a job that still allows for creative expression. And that is, I think, not mainly a matter of hours worked, but a question of liking what you do for a living. When you are forced to spend your days doing something that holds little fascination for you or has very harsh working conditions, even working part-time can leave you too exhausted for the kind of playful mindset you need for creative endeavours. But this problem is not solved or entirely avoided by being a full-time writer or artist.
This is my long way of saying something short: I think more people should write, and I think more people should pursue other creative activities.
AI can hurt creativity, yes, but it can also act as a set of training wheels for people who lack the confidence to get started.
If I were to write a guide for AI use in creative writing, it would go like the following.
When to use AI, and when to steer clear
Playing around with AI, testing its capabilities, using it for research (careful with the sources though), generating seed-like ideas that you can use as a starting point for your own work - yes, absolutely.
Following the initial seed, exploring your own associations, dreams, memories - no.
Writing a first draft - no.
Rewriting the first draft so that it gets closer to what you actually want to express - maybe (in the absence of human test readers).
Polishing the draft before showing it to others (orthography, punctuation, maybe grammar) - yes (but maybe you’ll find that your own version is better).
(And an important caveat: Think very hard about what kind of personal writing or even identifiable information you want to input into an AI tool. Personally, I treat any AI platform as if any input from me will one day become public, which is I think a reasonable guideline. Like the universe is moving towards entropy, our information systems are moving towards data getting into anyone’s systems and hands.)
As a non-native English speaker, I find that AI sometimes polishes away what I want to keep. People have told me that even in the absence of actual errors, even when I use idiomatic expressions, the way I write has some tell-tale features that give me away as a German (or someone vaguely central European at least): my love for abstraction, the way I use metaphors, the occasional overly long sentence. But do I want to be polished into sounding like someone who was born in London or New York, into someone not me? That would wipe out a lot of other parts of myself as well, so: No, thank you.
Play and explore
In writing groups (as a participant and leader/organizer) and in everyday conversations in random contexts, I have often heard that people say about themselves that they can’t write. If AI helps to remove this barrier to creative writing, at least a bit, it’s a good and valuable tool. And it can still be dangerous in other ways. We have to live with that contradiction.
It is probably better for everyone individually and for society as a whole if a few more people spend their free hours playing around with an AI and using it as a starting point for their own creative journey, rather than just passively scrolling around on social media.
Anyway, here comes this article’s most important point, a point I am missing in many discussions about how AI will “kill” creativity:
Creative endeavours are something that humans have been doing for their own sake, as play, as a way of feeling more alive (which is basically the same as playing), or to make others understand how it feels to be alive in one’s own skin.
This absolutely cannot be replaced by any AI-generated results because it’s not an isolated output, it’s something that we do. Creative play can’t be separated from those who are playing, and those playing are always us humans (or, for play that doesn’t require language, other feeling animals).