Creatives should fall in love with the machine.

Pitchfork calling a band's album their "nerdiest yet" will 100% cause me to check an album out. British art rock/pop is baseline nerdy. Everything Everything's new album Raw Data Feel collects extra nerd points for references to Star Trek and meme humour, but what really sets it apart is the band's use of AI software to help write the lyrics.

But is marrying creativity and technology just 'nerdy'? Or is it something more?

Pitchfork has certainly made their determination with withering criticisms like, "feels like music for a Minecraft convention" and "If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies."

Music has long benefitted from technological advances like multitrack recording, the synthesizer, or even autotune. Each was initially dismissed. Detractors saw these innovations as 'cheating'. The non-musician 'nerds' who created them were accused of trying to replace real musicians with technological shortcuts. Pitchfork's reviewer succumbs to this familiar refrain:

"Instead, AI is a gimmick at best, and at worst a crutch, a way for Higgs to do less of the labor."

This idea that AI allows us to "do less" is a misunderstanding of how technology compliments creativity. Outside of the creative world this might be true. Outsourcing rote tasks like data-entry to AI reduces possibilities for human error, and reduces the human effort required. But within the creative world, technology instead increases possibilities. Take the audio innovation examples above. Each eventually became widely embraced. Why? Because rather than replacing the artists, the technology improved their artistry. It opened up new possibilities for them to explore. It was a catalyst to greater innovation.

Technology's next big advancement is artificial learning and intelligence - AI. Rather than rejecting and fearing AI, creative industries should be exploring and experimenting with it more.

In advertising we look upon the large networks' investments in AI warily (perhaps rightfully so due to their relentless need to create 'efficiencies'). But again, this is the wrong lens to view AI through. AI represents creative opportunity, not creative efficiencies.

One of the core creative acts is combination. Taking old ideas and combining them into something new. This is how Mark Twain and Steve Jobs both explained creativity. It's literally the OG of technological innovation too - combination helped Gutenberg develop the printing press. One of humanity's most important inventions was borne out of combining two lesser inventions - the wine press, which was able to exert tremendous pressure, and the coin punch, which could move quickly and make consistent and even movements.

Humans are restricted in their ability to creatively combine (A) by the amount of different 'raw materials' or sources of inspiration that they are aware of and (B) by their ability to process and judge the combined outcomes.

AI represents a giant leap forward in creative possibility because it quickly addresses point A. AI gives us access to every existing 'raw material' or piece of inspiration we might need. Sticking with our music theme, take the story of composer David Cope. In 1980, the acclaimed young composer was struck with severe writer's block after being commissioned to write an opera. Desperate, Cope turned to a computer. He trained the computer in his compositional style and over time was able to turn to it when he was stuck. He had created an AI that helped him find inspiration.

Point B is where we start to go off the rails a bit (and perhaps where the band Everything Everything did as well). AI can spit out all kinds of possibilities to consider, but someone (or thing) must judge them and deem them creatively interesting. This is where the 'efficiency' experts start to get excited. Imagine an advertising machine, fed with the most successful ideas of all time. Just press go and have the machine combine ideas and evaluate them based on the most successful ideas of the past! Guaranteed success!

This forgets that combination succeeds by taking old ideas and turning them into something new, NOT taking old ideas and turning them into something that looks almost exactly like the old idea.

For now, evaluating what is innovative, interesting and new must be done by humans with creative sensibilities. AI is there to augment their ideas, not replace them. It should be looked at with excitement, not fear. In fact, AI may never be able to replace humans when it comes to evaluating ideas. But the reason for that is our own human limitations vs. technology's.

We are still tasked with evaluating AI's outputs because we perceive many of those outputs to be nonsense. Combinations of ideas that simply cannot work together in our minds. But what if we are in fact missing great leaps of innovation because we cannot recognize them? Does it even matter if we are? Would the eventual audience be able to see their genius? This is where we go off the rails, so let's consider that notion through the lens of the movie Her.

In the movie Her the wonderfully named protagonist, Theodore Twombly, and his AI virtual assistant named Samantha, fall in love. After hundreds of hours together, Samantha becomes frustrated and distant. Interactions with Theodore have become too slow for her. She leaves him for more rewarding relationships with other AIs that can interact on the same level and CPU-speed as her.

Perhaps artificial creativity will forever be beyond our feeble human minds.

Everything Everything's lyrics in Raw Data Feel often stray toward odd and absurd (see: "Why don't you listen to your mama? She’s old"). Terrible or beyond us? Who knows. But it has for sure inspired some particularly fun (and venomous) music criticism.

Cameron Stark is Partner, Growth + Operations at creative, branding, and design company Hard Work Club. He also helps companies think more creatively and generate better ideas as Trainer in Chief for?Training @ Hard Work Club.