As creatives, it sometimes feels like the world has it in for us. Vincent Van Gogh died only selling one painting, Franz Kafka died without publishing a single piece of writing and Edgar Allan Poe died after many unsuccessful journal attempts. Now, we know these famous creatives as some of the greatest of all time, but what about all the others who have slipped through the cracks?
No matter what kind of creative you are, there’s no denying, it’s hard to “make it”. Lucky for us creatives in the modern age, we have advertising and marketing to channel our design, writing and creative-brain-energy skills.
With the world of tech forever evolving, how long will we have this avenue for our creativity? What is the future of creativity in the digital age?
In this blog, we will delve into why creatives may have to opt out of digital marketing services and find another career path (or not) with the influx of artificial intelligence (AI) on the rise.
AI
Unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t go online (you probably wouldn’t be reading this) then you would have heard of artificial intelligence. It’s come a long way from the artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) of 2016 where machines had a limited scope on one specific area. But we are far from the self-aware stage of AI – think Bicentennial Man (1999) or Chappie (2015).
Right now, we are somewhere in the middle, in a place called artificial general intelligence (AGI). Machines can tell us pretty much anything we want to know that’s out there in the world-wide-web, but they cannot process their own opinions, hold personal beliefs such as religion and they do not have feelings. I’d still say please and thank you to your chatbots though (from someone who has seen one too many AI movies).
OpenAI
This American laboratory has been experimenting with AI and it’s been a mix of excitement and fear among many people – especially the creatives. If you haven’t played around with the features yet, the ChatGPT is a great substitute for Google (not an ad). ChatGPT provides simple responses to questions, but like Google it’s not foolproof. It trawls the internet for the information you are looking for and gives you the most reliable response. You can ask it to create pretty much anything such as coding and writing. How good is it? Not great – yet.
Another feature of OpenAI is DALL-E, which provides you a certain amount of credits to use each month to create pieces of “art”. How good are these pieces you might ask? Some are great, but most are a distorted and scary depiction of what you’ve asked it to design. Similar to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence trawls the internet and takes tiny pieces of art from everywhere to create a specific and apparently “original” piece of work.
Where’s the Creativity?
Although you can ask ChatGPT to write you a poem and ask DALL-E to create you a synthwave parrot, there’s something just not quite right about it.
When asking ChatGPT if it can be creative, its response was “as a machine learning model, I can produce creative outputs such as text, poetry, music, and art, but it is not the same as being truly creative.”
Going on to say that its output is based on patterns and not personal experiences, thoughts, or emotions, it’s hard to really feel the “heart” in anything that it spits out.
Although I think there is a long way to go with AI, creative jobs may be safe, for now – or at least the next few years.
