Artificial Intelligence (AI) – A creative machine 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been causing riot in the creative industry. 

Previously, the only people who were concerned about AI were ‘Go’ players when an AI system created by Deepmind named ‘AlphaGo’, defeated a world champion with 18 world titles back in 2016. Fast forward to early 2023, OpenAI released ‘ChatGPT-3’, a general purpose AI chatbot that can basically interpret and process natural language using optimised language models. In simple terms, ChatGPT-3 is a generative AI that can determine dialogue through prompts submitted by humans.

Once the AI chatbot successfully completes an interpretation of your input text, it will subsequently generate a creative output that is most probabilistic to your requested outcome derived from your input. ChatGPT-3 is a multifunctional tool that can be used to produce software code, create any genre of music, write interesting articles and even resolve mathematical problems. Assistive AI is an impressive toolkit for any business to own, if they can figure out a method of integrating the AI system into their current working pipeline. Considering the full capability that AI could offer, not before long society will probably be able to substitute any kind of repetitive labour in any job sector. 

“30% of jobs could, technically, be replaced in an AI revolution by 2030.”

Source: Art for our sake: artists cannot be replaced by machines

In a newly published interview with Oxford University economist, Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey, he had highlighted the fact that ChatGPT-3 will introduce more competition, resulting in a trend of lowered wages for the majority of “low-skill, low-income” jobs. However, in a different but separate interview the economist also pointed out that creative industries will most likely gain from having greater access to openAI tools such as ChatGPT-3, leading to better quality of production. 

Is AI a creative machine that will transform the creative industry?

Differences in attitude depend on the imaginative nature of an individual about how the future will shape out to be and it can usually be categorised as followed: 

• That AI will threaten to take all of our jobs and make humanity obsolete
• AI technology will open up creativity to anybody in the world

Whatever you believe AI will achieve in the future, it will be a revolution that the world will eventually have to face. According to some people, this evolution of AI can be compared to the first introduction of photographic imagery and the threat of the idea in which painters will cease to exist. Instead photography branched out, developing its own community and style, arguably improving the artistic vision of creatives, since they now have the ability to capture real world references photographically for inspiration. Image based generative AI like DALL-E 2 will probably be used as a complementary tool for artists and designers, instead of the scary thought of a respectable occupation being dead.

The situation we humans are now experiencing with AI technology has made us question the purpose of our working lives. This self reflection in understanding that AI can completely replace your job whilst doing it better and more efficiently has caused a major existential crisis. Although the prospect sounds frightening, it is only the manual labour within the creative process that is being alleviated by AI. As of yet, human decision making can never be replicated by current AI technology. In a sense, this new technology will just speed up the creative workflow but artists will still have the final say on whether the output generated by the AI requires any further adjustments.    

In conclusion, utilising generative AI is just the same as sketching a portrait traditionally using a pencil or digitally. There will be advantages and disadvantages to either formats and if an artist disagrees with the advancement of technology, they still have the option to continue their work in the absence of openAI tools, it really is a matter of personal preference.

Creativity is just an act of human expression with or without generative AI !