Does AI Kill Creativity?
As a creator, I’ve spent many years condemning the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for creative works; perhaps subconsciously out of my own existential fear of becoming irrelevant. I, like most other creators, thought AI was some sort of creative-abomination here to take away our jobs; rather than enhance our current way of doing things. However, recently, I’ve really been leaning into utilizing templates on Canva to create (rather quickly, I might add) marketing materials that are both aesthetically pleasing and informative.
Granted, there are some creative-purists out there who would also condemn me for using Canva, as I once did to other creators, being more in favour of the traditional Adobe platforms to create work (Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, just to name a few). Now, I still use these tools, but in terms of my use-to-create ratio, I’d say that they’ve all lagged behind substantially in favour of Canva.
I was even praised recently for something that I had made—a 1-page poster that would be hung at various places and sent out digitally—and the person didn’t even know that I had actually started the design with a template from Canva before finalizing it.
Cheating? Some creators would say so, but I would say it’s more so an efficiency-of-creation (because I’m not reinventing the wheel), while also being an elevation of my creative process (it provided me with an initial idea, and I took it to the next level). Now, I don’t use ChatGPT for my written or creative works (yet), but the principle I see now is the exact same.
Why slave away at building something from scratch, when something has already been built and you can take that something to the next level? This isn’t creative-cannibalization or a destruction of the industry as a whole; rather, an evolution and enhancement of it.
Let’s take a different example: the car. Sure, you could be a purist about travel and still use a horse and buggy; however, you can go further and do more with a car. Or a more commonly used example: spell check. Sure, you could be a purist about your writing and use a dictionary to double check every other word, but you can get more ideas out faster if you didn’t have to stop every two seconds to make sure you didn’t accidentally spell something incorrectly.
What I’m getting at here is that AI—like all other tools—is just a tool. It’s up to the wielder to use it effectively. If you’ve ever seen those katana videos where novices try to cut through a series of things and they never cleanly cut through everything, but then the master-wielder is able to cut through everything in one go*, that’s basically what I’m talking about here.
The real issue is when a wielder uses AI as a crutch for creating, without any skill to back it up. Sure, you can get away with it for now, but for how long? And how good will your work be compared to someone who knows how to create both ways (using AI and not).
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t vilify AI (like I used to), nor worry that it will somehow take away our jobs. Sure, it may take away some jobs, but a tool is only as good as the one who wields it, and with that I say: game on. We’ve both got the same AI tools at our disposal, now it’s up to the uber-creative between us to come up with the better work of art.
Case in point: if you haven’t heard Drake’s diss track to Kendrick that uses AI to simulate Tupac and Snoop Dogg* yet, you’re missing out! That was truly one of the most musically creative and clever things I’ve heard in a long time, and a great example of putting AI to work while still being a masterful creator oneself—after all, someone still had to write the lyrics and tweak the production audio; AI just helped Drake take the track to the next level.
-so, go ahead, embrace technology; but above all, create cool stuff!