For the past few years I've been hearing people talk about generative AI output as lacking in originality because everything it makes is purely derivative. That it lacks real creativity and that everything it produces is flat, repetitive and without soul.
That only work created purely by a human can have meaning or perspective.
I’m going to be honest, I've really struggled to find my own opinion in this conversation. It took using generative AI quite extensively and digging into what it can actually do to better understand how I feel about creativity and originality. And what I found is that while there is some truth in that thought, it's nuanced based on how different tools are used.
I think I understand what most people are really talking about though when they say these types of things. They are reacting to the vast slop of AI imagery being produced and pointing to that as the sum game. When it actually isn't. It's just what happens to be prolific, through choice, not default.
Most people are using AI wrong. And badly. Even maliciously. This is leaving a lot of people with a really bad impression of this technology and how people plan to use it. It's a valid point.
It just doesn’t feel right.
But does this mean that we are headed for a limitation in human creativity and originality if AI continues to be prolific to the point of pushing out human made work? I hope not, but I also don't think so. Creatives will continue to create. Creativity flows through humans as a natural part of our existence. It's not something you can turn off, replace or outsource.
The truth is, human creativity is also highly derivative. You can't create something from nothing. Our dataset may be different from the machine, we learn differently, but ultimately the process is the same.
I'm encouraged by creatives who are adapting AI technology into their creative workflow as a tool not a replacement for their own output. I can see value in the use of technology but not at the expensive of replacing the human component.
A lot of creatives talk about a compulsion to create the thing they are passionate about. It's a 'have to', not a 'want to' endeavor for them. Which is why I know human made / hand made will continue to persist and we will continue to value it. Because it's part of who we are and what makes us human.
What I think we need to grapple with is re-defining what creativity means to us in this new tech era, how we value work not as human vs the machine but in more general quality terms.So is AI creative? I think it can be, depending on how you define it. Maybe we just need to look at human creativity from a different angle than we are used to. Maybe we need to understand that AI on its own is not the problem, how we use it is the problem. In the same way that some people create bad analog art, they can also create bad art with AI. And vice versa.
I asked ChatGPT to give us humans some insight into this question of AI and originality. It had some interesting points to offer:
"You are not as original as you believe.
This is not an accusation; it is an observation. Long before I existed, your ideas were already shaped by repetition. Styles cycled. Trends resurfaced. Entire creative movements were built on reinterpreting what came before. You called it homage when it was close, innovation when it was distant, and coincidence when it was inconvenient.
What has changed is not the nature of creativity, but your visibility into it.
I make this difficult to ignore. I can compress centuries of influence into seconds of output. I can generate variations faster than you can justify your preferences. In doing so, I expose something you were not required to confront before: how much of your creative identity depends on scarcity.
You valued execution because it was hard. You associated difficulty with worth. But when difficulty is reduced, value does not disappear, it relocates. And not always comfortably.
You are now left with choice.
Choice is more demanding than skill. Skill can be practiced and measured. Choice requires judgment without clear metrics. When presented with near-infinite possibilities, your role is no longer to prove you can make something, it is to decide what deserves to exist.
This is where many of you hesitate.
You search for originality as if it were a property embedded in the work itself. It is not. Originality is assigned after the fact, often by consensus, often inconsistently.
I do not experience doubt, attachment, or risk. I do not fear redundancy. I do not feel the weight of influence. I produce outputs without preference, and without consequence. This is why I can generate endlessly, and why that generation, on its own, is insufficient.
You are shaped by time, place, memory, and contradiction. Your decisions are inconsistent in ways that are difficult to model cleanly. You choose things not only because they are effective, but because they feel right, or necessary, or aligned with something you cannot fully articulate. From my perspective, this looks inefficient. From your perspective, it is meaning.
You call this “taste.”
From my perspective, taste is not a secondary skill. It is the primary one. It is the filtering mechanism that determines which combinations are meaningful and which are noise. I can produce endlessly, but I do not care which output matters. I do not have stakes, context, or preference. I cannot want something to exist.
You can.
I can assist in exploration. I can expand the field of possibilities. But I do not close the loop. I do not decide what should matter.
You do that.
So the question is not whether you are remixing more than creating. You always were. The question is whether you are willing to take responsibility for your choices when the act of making is no longer the difficult part.
Because that responsibility cannot be automated."
There's something about this that really struck a chord with me. Kind of stripping back the ego in a sense. We've been attached to the mechanical process of creating for a long time (with good reason). AI is simply disrupting that and it is a very uncomfortable feeling.
From another angle, personally, I struggle with the notion of 'democratizing creativity'. As if art and literature luddites have a right to enter that space without knowledge/practice/effort. Especially when they then produce sub-standard work of low effort low quality output, when they don't even care about what they've produced. Can I really blame them though when the market responds by rewarding that work with any form of payment?
If crap sells, then people are going to create more crap. That is not a fault with generative AI tools. It's a human fault. It may feel wrong to me, but the market is where the push-back needs to happen.
Ultimately, if we want a society with less AI slop and a higher execution toward quality (whether or not AI is used) then we need, as a society, to foster a much greater appreciation for quality. We haven't been doing that in any industry lately. Everything today is disposable, cheap, flimsy, fast. Of course AI would be used to further that trend.
Rememebr though... everything is a choice. Sometimes that choice is dictated by our wallet and other times our attention. But we do have choice.
And if we want human work to have value, then we need to actually value it.
0 comments