JANUARY 2025 – I have been grappling for the last year or so with what creativity and art means in the new age of artificial intelligence. The progress in technology has been incredible with LLM, image/video generation tools, and AIP tools. Just amazing. Like many others have pointed out, I sort of thought the future and technological innovation would be more like the jetsons with robots and devices that made our food, etc. It is very interesting that knowledge work and creativity is going to be disrupted next in a profound way, I didn’t see that coming.
Innovations to make infinite carbon free energy, safe/fast mass transportation, or remove more of the drudgery from life were more on my bingo card. That doesn’t make the awe and amazement at what engineers and programmers have achieved any less real, as it is absolutely incredible what the current batch of AIs can do (and it is only the beginning here in 2025!!). Having them be able to write stories, create images, and even do ever larger and larger scale animation is a lot to take in as a creative person.
On one-hand it opens up tons of possibilities and is a new tool towards taking your vision and making it a reality. It is also unsettling to see the speed at what can be created which before would have taken a ton of dedicated creative labor and concentration. What’s the play? Have an AI write the first-draft of your book from a prompt and then fine tune it from there? Is that really your work? I suppose in a way. For many computational tasks this new analytic power is incredible and it does allow anyone to take an idea and bring it forward. So there should be no lack of content going forward. I want to be optimistic about it, but I’m also a bit unsettled by what it means. Maybe the scope and scale of the creative aperture is just that much wider now. And all we can do is embrace this new era as like it or not, AI is here to stay in a major way.
The above graphic was made by Grok AI from a prompt. Super cool! I was trying to illustrate a scene from ‘The Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown, which I read again this month. With the wintry weather it was nice to revisit a favorite book and a fun adventure story at that. The book has such reverence for the ancient masters, it seemed fitting to enjoy it as we move into a new realm of artistry and pay our respects for all that has come before.
I would certainly use AI to research historical concepts for my writing, but at this point in time I wouldn’t use an AI to write my book for me. As to me that sort of defeats the purpose of letting my own voice be heard. What do you think? Would you use an AI to write a book for you? Does generative art feel different to you? Are we not going to be able to tell the difference before long?
~ CS
