AI Will Destroy Creativity: Artificial Intelligence’s Impact on Artistry
A previous draft of this piece was originally published in The Exonian, the oldest continuously-running preparatory school newspaper in America. Find more at theexonian.net/opinions
My mom runs an Etsy shop selling adorable puppy stickers and sublimated t-shirts. Her products range from customized pins to eye-watering stickers of our King Charles Cavelier Spanier that go on everything from my water bottle to my backpack.
Now, my mom is a pretty artsy person. She loves coloring and digital drawing.
But when I asked her how she made her sticker designs, she told me that she used generative AI to make the designs.
She would input a prompt into Midjourney, such as: “King Charles Cavelier Spanier wearing hat, transparent background…” etc., and then fine-tune the results until she had what she liked.
And, she uses ChatGPT to generate the descriptions for her shop—so her shop is nearly 100% generative AI.
Seeing how useful AI seemed to my mom, I began to think about generative AI’s impact. Not about the impact of AI on the job market, or whether generative AI such as ChatGPT could have consciousness.
No, I was curious about AI’s impact on art, specifically.
The most popular question about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern discourse is whether it will be more intelligent than humans. In other words, whether AI will be able to solve problems better than humans in the future.
However, I believe the real question isn’t whether AI will become more intelligent, but whether it will be more creative. To be clear, the real question is whether creativity can ever be artificial, whether truly breathtaking art can ever be fit in a processor, and whether world-changing novel creations could ever arise from transistors.
A few months before my mom told me about her shop, I read this article by historian Yuval Noah Harari—where he described AI’s dangerous potential to manipulate human civilization. He suggested that AI will replace our ability to tell stories in the future—and therefore, collaborate properly.
But part of his claim seemed off to me. His reasoning rested on the assumption that AI would eventually become equal, or even better than humans at creating art. To me, that did not seem possible.
So in this article, I will show how humans approach creativity, how a generative AI does the same, and the theoretical future of artistry after AI.
Intelligence has always been human. Through neurons and synapses, humans absorb problems, think about them, rearrange them, and spit those inputs out as solutions. In this way, humans are intelligent. They can quickly and efficiently transform something learned into an output — be it a plan, a thought, or a physical reaction.
Artificial intelligence endeavors to translate this process into a computer. Instead of axons, AI uses wires. Instead of biological neurons, AI uses machine learning nodes. Instead of enzymes and chemicals, AI uses light-speed electrical charges. Artificial intelligence transforms an input into an output digitally. AI is humanity’s attempt to transfer its intelligence onto a machine — and it does it very well. This is artificial intelligence.
Creativity, on the contrary, is different from intelligence. Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to make original, innovative, even unusual ideas, often in the form of art. But how exactly does creativity work?
Creativity is a strange mixture of imitation and personal inspiration. For example: notice that after you read a section of Shakespeare or look at enough Van Gogh paintings, you can magically imitate Shakespeare’s style or Van Gogh’s strokes, albeit roughly. And if you study, perform, and listen to enough Mozart, you might hear yourself subconsciously humming tunes that sound like Mozart. Or perhaps after listening to a few hours of Dr. Martin Luther King’s great orations, you might find yourself speaking like Dr. King quite intuitively.
What’s happening here is, I propose, twofold: creative absorption, and creative rearrangement. In other words, by consuming art, you absorb artistic “particles” — perhaps a very short musical phrase, or maybe a rhetorical rhythm, even a general mood — and then you rearrange them in a way that imitates the original creator. All of this happens subconsciously and intuitively, and it is what makes the human brain so magical.
However, with this logic, nothing really “new” is created. This model of creativity suggests that these “particles” are just being circulated among artists, being chopped and glued together in our minds. Really, these ideas are semi-novel ideas. Like a structural isomer in chemistry, particles might be arranged differently, but really, the particles are all the same.
So how in the world can art ever progress? How do people imagine new things? There must be some other source of artistic “particles” that explain why art evolves. Or else, art remains just a myriad of colors being ever distorted by time.
I propose that the other source of inspiration that artists have is life itself. There is a granular complexity to life and nature. This complexity subconsciously inspires every artist, writer, musician, and thinker. How a painter feels one day influences what they create. How a pianist sits, perhaps the weather outside, or a conversation that has been lurking in their subconscious for some time, are all sources for completely novel ideas. This source, external to any musical score or essay, is the source of all novel, revolutionary art. This is how humans approach creativity—through a mix of imitation and also personal experiences.
How does Artificial Intelligence approach creativity? Artificial intelligence, at the moment, creates art by imitating human creations. When programmers create an artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, they essentially feed it on a massive dataset of literature, and then tell it to imitate that literature.
After being fed trillions of artistic particles, it can rearrange them in ways that haven’t been seen before, it can paint things that haven’t been painted before, and it can write things that haven’t been written before.
But is AI art truly new? No, artificial intelligence does not truly have unlimited creativity—because it doesn’t experience life like a human artist does. AI can only make a semi-novel rearrangement of artistic particles. It can’t impart the beauty of life into new, fresh artistic ideas. This means that artificial intelligence, or rather, artificial creativity, is only semi-novel.
So what does this mean for creativity as a whole? What happens if the way we choose to be “creative” is by the processor, not by the human mind?
Imagine a world where people read books, listen to music, and look at images that are only produced by AI. There’s no need for people to learn writing if they can manipulate an AI to imitate Mark Twain himself. There’s no need for people to learn instruments if they can tell an AI to write Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. There’s no need for people to learn how to paint or do graphic design if an AI can imitate Picasso to the smallest detail. Because for most users, novelty isn’t necessary. All they need is something that works. That makes AI a very powerful tool. For the first time, people will no longer need to be creative. Technology can do it.
The advent of artificial creativity can be compared to the advent of writing. Before writing came about, people remembered stories through memory. The Illiad, a Greek epic of thousands of lines, was passed down purely through memory and speaking. When writing came about, there was no need to remember things anymore. Therefore, the human faculty of memory became weak, because it wasn’t used.
Just like memory, human creativity will weaken due to artificial creativity. Writing was a substitute for memory. So memory was no longer needed.
But unlike memory, artificial creativity isn’t a substitute for true creativity. Only true creativity can spin the pedals of art, of writing, of history itself. And true creativity only comes from humanity, because only human artistry can reflect the intricacy of life onto truly novel ideas.
Take, for example, the following painting.
Primordial Chaos, №16 by Hilma af Klint, can be considered one of the earliest “abstract” paintings ever.
Klint originally started her art career painting nature and landscapes, traditional artworks very different from her later abstractions such as Primordial Chaos.
But after her sister died in 1880, her experiences with grief and spirituality began to affect her paintings. Klint was a member of The Five, a group of women at the Academy of Fine Arts — who prayed, meditated, and conversed about abstract art every meeting. Painted in 1906, the strange and new style in Primordial Chaos reflected Klint’s growing spirituality and confusion.
This “invention” of a unique style is what makes human artistry so irreplaceable. AI cannot live as Klint did, starting with the materialist style of the 19th century, and then imparting life experiences onto a new, revolutionary style of art. If you fed Klint’s paintings to an AI, it could probably imitate her work pretty well. But it can’t innovate as she did.
As it is now, anyone can still create novel ideas that would be impactful on the art scene as a whole. There is still a chance to be creative. But elite human artistry has no strength against a massive technological tsunami like AI.
Already, people are relying more and more on artificial intelligence to replace their creativity. Students, for instance, use generative AI more than they might like to admit. Teachers are beginning to implement “AI literacy” into classrooms, hoping to “adapt” artificial creativity into human-centered classrooms. And my mom’s Etsy shop couldn’t survive without generative AI.
In fact, there are even socioeconomic implications for AI’s advent into art. Normally, artists come from all walks of life and all parts of society. Poor or rich, anyone can take up the brush and express themselves. That’s why there is such a diversity of artistic styles and ideas across the world.
However, in the future, when we don’t need to be creative anymore, the diversity of artists will decrease. True artists will become sequestered into an elite minority that holds a valuable skill no other human has. This idea — the degeneracy and sequestering of creativity — is horrifying in itself. Art is all about diversity. With AI, there’s no need for diversity.
In the final analysis, creativity is, and has always been central to human life. From millennia-old hand prints on cave walls to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it has always been our duty to create new styles, tell novel stories, and express the irreplaceable essence of life.
Generative AI takes that divine job of being creative away — and simultaneously delivers an inauthentic performance. Artificial intelligence will never be a substitute for creativity — so let's stop pretending it will be.
