Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Artistic Intelligence?
Sujatha Santhanam
Partner & Creative Head @InkSpeak Creative Communication Facilitator & Leadership Coach; Certified NLP Master Practitioner
Recently, I read the 2016 World Economic Forum report on Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which predicted that more than five million jobs will be lost to automation and robots by 2020.
As someone in the creative business, I have always believed creativity or artistic intelligence is that one domain, which won’t be taken over by the bots. After all, they only know what has been fed into them and creativity cannot be programmed. So, till a while ago, I firmly believed that I had no risk of losing my job due to robotic revolution, and writing, painting, or any such artistic jobs would remain exclusive to humans.
I know it sounds funny or rather ignorant of me to think like this. But before you start judging me, I would like to tell you that my thoughts have changed a bit. A wee bit.
We all know AI operates on repetition. A bot is able to perform like a human, because it has been programmed to react to certain data in a certain way. The gist is, they learn and perform only by repetition and sequence, but not by intuition, at least not as of now. For instance, in advertising, we make use of emotional intelligence when designing a marketing campaign. While selecting a picture or image for a particular communication piece, we consider the emotional implications, context and the target audience we are designing the communication for. However, a bot would select an image based on the result derived from the data alone, without taking into consideration the emotional elements. So, one thing is for sure. Judgement based on emotional appeals are still a human domain and cannot be replaced by machines.
However, like I said earlier, my thoughts on AI have changed a bit. As AI makes its way into our household, I am not too sure how far are we to losing our creative jobs to bots, but I am certain about one thing - with all the monotonous jobs getting automated, AI is definitely paving the way for the artiste in me to thrive.
Working in the corporate world takes the fun out of creative jobs. Today, an artiste or a creative professional working in corporate has to do the regular monotonous activities, which leaves them with less or no time to indulge in creative thinking. But if we let AI into the creative departments, it will help evolve artistic creativity. There are a lot of necessary but uninteresting jobs attached to creativity as well, that could be handed off to the bots for us to thrive in our artistic environment.
AI can also help us get better ideas and create more impactful communication. If we look at the amount of data being generated and analyzed it could help us make an informed decision and also take away all the daily chores of paper work and processes. Just imagine, if a writer had an AI as an assistant, who could put together the facts and create a draft of information collected. The writer could then weave in the story with the human touch and present it to the audience. At least, the data part of it could be taken care of by the AI. The writer need not spend all the time in the research.
Stitching the facts and my intuitions together, I feel AI could help us gather information, analyse them and enable us to weave our stories in a better and more informed manner. So, sooner or later, there would come a time when there would be writers and designers who would embrace AI and churn out better, relevant and informed creative pieces. In future, AI can definitely become an artist’s well-deserved assistant, welcome in our creative departments to assist us in our pursuit of artistic expression.
What do you think? Are you ready to embrace Artificial Intelligence yet?
Author of the Amazon global bestseller, Ideas on Demand, a crash course on creativity. #10x #Creativity #ideas
6 年You have touched upon really important topic Sujatha. In past whenever I thought about it, my conclusion was the same as yours: In future, AI may replace countless things humans do at present, but not the creativity. Here, by creativity, I am referring to creative ideas, not the artistic creativity. I believe, the very core of creativity is the unexpected twist by connecting the completely unrelated dots. AI can show us infinite ways of connecting the dots. But will all the connections elicit a wow? This’s where the intuition or gut feeling comes into play. The same holds good with a good joke. In the beginning, it looks like any other narration but the unexpected twist at the end elicits the laughter. Now, can we say that in future, AI, based on the data, will churn out thousands of jokes? To me it seems very unlikely. While I still believe what I had mentioned above, your article has opened my mind to an interesting possibility: Creativity is all about generating many ideas. We often wonder, which one would click? This is where AI may come handy. Based on the analysis of humongous data of past, AI may help us to choose the ideas that has the highest possibility to succeed. So, as you have mentioned, AI may offer a valuable support to creativity. That said, no one knows for sure. All are making their own guesses. This is my two pennies worth.