Human Creativity- Beginning of the End?

The incursion of Artificial Intelligence into our lives has been anticipated for a long time now. There are those that welcome it as the arrival of a new age of prosperity and ease awhile others see it as a definitive sign that humanity as we know it is doomed.

However, in both cases, the underlying expectation has been that AI will translate into automation that will make human labour whether physical or mental increasingly irrelevant. There is reason for that expectation- robots and algorithms have been pushing human effort out of the mix inexorably in a vast range of sectors.

Which is what makes the latest tools that AI is developing so interesting. There is an explosion of creative applications that use AI to generate a vast range of creative outputs. We have tools that allow us to generate art from text or the spoken word, that allow for a photograph to be rendered in the artistic style of various painters. We can generate music from the description of a mood, merge styles of different composers, both traditional and modern. We can turn a picture into cartoons, ‘breed’ new images by marrying several existing ones. And this just the beginning-- the possibilities going forward are endless.

The meaning of the content generated by AI is often debated. Some people believe that AI-generated content is meaningless and lacks the depth of human-created content. Others argue that AI is capable of creating meaningful and valuable content, especially as it continues to learn and evolve. However, the jury is still out on whether or not AI-generated content is truly meaningful.

The above paragraph was machine written- and is part of a 1000 word article that was generated with this simple instruction ‘Write an article about AI generated creative tools’.??The article in its entirety included findings from some research that the tool found on its own and read like a perfectly reasonable if generic take on the subject. One had the option of choosing the level of creativity one wanted as well the tone which that one wished to strike. One can image what kind of an impact this new ability will have on a whole range of domains- journalism (The Guardian already uses AI tools to generate news reports), advertising and even school essays. Copywriting for ads has become ridiculously simple- one just needs to provide a sense of what the product does and the AI tool does the rest.

For years, when discussing with dread the role of AI in our lives, we have tended to look at the progress have made through the lens of automation. The underlying feeling has been that while AI can substitute human endeavours in many areas, it could never hope to replace the power of human imagination. The common belief was that while jobs would be lost in manufacturing and even some services, the domains of art and creative expression would continue to be dominated by human minds.

This is clearly no longer the case. What does this mean for the future of humanity? Are we condemned to become passive consumers in a world where very little is expected of us and where machines deliver to us whatever we articulate as our needs? With time will we even need to do so- won’t AI understand what we really want better than we can?

It raises a question of another kind. Is human creativity overvalued? If a machine can, even in these early days of AI, come this close to producing various forms of creative output, then has the near-mystical status that creativity enjoys in our estimation been a delusion?

Is human imagination for all its apparent unpredictability and diverseness, really a set of protocols that a sufficiently advanced machine can figure out? Is it our inability to discern those patterns, more complex than the ones we encounter in realms considered logical, that results in our fascination with creativity? A few years ago, a team of Israeli researchers analysed 200 award winning ads and found that 89% could be classified in just 6 categories. Their contention was that far being unpredictable, most highly regarded creative work was just working off some basic templates.

Perhaps what this means is that we have set a somewhat low bar when it comes to calling things creative. All AI has done is to expose the myth that has been built around creativity. By democratising it, what it has allowed for is the unseating of the high priests of creativity by making it accessible to all. The large forces of democratisation- mass manufacture of products, travel, food, fashion, opinions and now art are inexorably unravelling the hierarchies that have dominated society for so long.

But is it correct to conflate creative tools with creativity itself? For what AI and Machine Learning do is an advanced form of pattern recognition. They work backwards from what exists and ‘create’ using a form of imitation. They examine a huge amount of creative material and discern patterns and reconfigure them given a certain input context. They do not exercise imagination in the way human beings do; their output might be scarily plausible, but it is dependent on having examples of human imagination as a starting point.

Eventually art is not synonymous with its output. Human beings create in response to the context- films capture the emotional undercurrents of a time, schools of art evolve as a response to the world as it changes around us, music incorporates elements from everything that we experience- to reduce all forms of creative expression to ‘products’ that look and sound like the real thing is not creativity, but an act of creative simulation. What it does enable is an augmentation of imagination, and a fluency of creative production. AI does not create, nor does it concern itself with causality. That continues to be a human skill. For now.?

(This is a version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)?