“AI will make creative people curators of prompts” and other tragedies.
In my first ad agency job, when I was still learning to be an advertising designer and copywriter, we did a lot of TV spots and in-store promotions for a burger chain. One of the unusual things about this client was that we’d won the business by doing funny, literate ads with an ensemble cast. It was a more like watching tiny snippets of Cheers or Friends than the typical burger ad of the time. (In fact, for a while Brett Harrelson, Woody’s brother, played our grill guy. We also cast Heather Donahue just before Blair Witch and actually paid her.) And these spots, and this format, were successful for years; most of the 1990s in fact. It was a pretty pleasurable creative experience for part of that time.
But it got harder when the chain hired a new person to manage the agency’s work. We’ll call him Vic. Because that was his name.
Vic was a smart guy, but he was a process guy. He often made life more difficult for us creatives. He didn’t really much care how delightful our placemat headlines had been or that they had successfully cajoled diners into ordering dessert. He was what we used to call “prescriptive”– A picture of the berry cobbler and the price, just do that. If we had proof something funnier would work and a reasoned argument, we might be able to sway him to add a voicy line that supported the brand. Maybe. But he once said, “Hey it’s just tap tap tap into the computer, right? I could probably do it myself.”
Today, he would get his wish.
A recent article in the Times postulates, among other things, that getting paid for a creative job will soon merely be a matter of the valuation of one’s taste. And that the job of having the taste to curate and tweak AI prompts and outputs is almost certainly the near-future of the “white collar” creative job.
The jobs of the photo retouchers, typographers, filmmakers, actors, cinematographers, audio techs, designers, writers, editors, illustrators, storyboarders – the crafts– will disappear. Some are disappearing now.
Here’s the thing. And it’s kind of a big thing for me. The thing about making things that made my long career mostly enjoyable and stimulating and worthy of the stories we tell about it isn’t in the management of processes. It’s the actual doing of the thing. It’s the mental stimulation you get from getting the thing from your head down through your sleeve and seeing what unexpected randomness happens on the way out your fingertips, and navigating the hazards and discoveries, like a skier or a jazz musician, on the way.
That’s where the fun is, that’s where the mental expansion is, and that’s where the uniqueness and surprise comes from. It’s the solving of the puzzles, the connecting of concepts, the happy mistakes and unexpected cosmic rhymes that make the job worth doing, and life worth living.
To doom everyone in the creative industry to unemployment or process management is the real tragedy of our AI-chained reality.
I’m sure very nice products will eventually be produced by this management of process, built on the work of centuries of actual innovators. But it probably won’t move anything very far forward. It will be attractive recursiveness, or nostalgia, or a ghost of when we all used to have a shared culture. But no one is going to get that dopamine rush you get when you are mastering a craft. It’s that mental rush that makes innovation happen. You don’t get Fallingwater to appear in 1937 by asking a computer to understand the habits of the previous 50 years of architecture. You get it by being a nearly-broke Frank Lloyd Wright on a deadline.
AI will rob creators of that. And bestow it on Vic. Sitting in an office. Unchallenged by collaboration. Just the berry cobbler and the price. Tap tap. Print. Done.
And AI may rob us all of the magic of future Fallingwaters.
I do think people may take on the crafts on their own to get that rush. There won’t be the market for it, because a facsimile of designing a house, or writing, or art, or filmmaking or making a poster can be done with a prompt by future Vics, without the honing force of negotiation with creatives, or your own self doubt.
The idea from that Times article that’s most suspect is that music producer Rick Rubin’s gift is taste, and that this is completely transferrable to managing AI processes.
If you’ve actually watched Rubin work, while taste is inarguably a gift, his ability to see what and who a musician is — what their strengths and weaknesses and potentials and ideas are, and use them to advantage, and cajole and emotionally challenge those musicians to make art. That’s very different than curating and tweaking AI outputs. The people who are gassed about curating outputs are not going to be Rick Rubins. They’re gonna be Vic.
I’m a musician too, and that craft of writing, playing and producing indie pop for nearly two decades has been infinitely enjoyable to me. It’s only made me a little money, but no matter. The process of working out a bass part and a guitar line and a middle eight and writing lyrics, and figuring out how to sing them with all my limitations doubtlessly fires a million synapses that wouldn’t ordinarily fire. That has to be good for keeping the brain in fighting shape. And so is knowing that somebody in Australia, and Poland, or Chicago and even Fiji now and again, is listening to something real that I made out of thin air. It’s very satisfying.
A collegue of mine, Brian, is also a musician. He’s been experimenting with generative music. “For me, the most kinda ugh moment I’ve had with AI is when it can just make a song from scratch. ‘Here’s a basic idea and type of song.’ Then it makes it. It really is a hollow feeling.”
And I understand that to us, this feeling is partly because it’s not the way we’ve done it, and thousands of people will make AI music and feel a kind of accomplishment by choosing their favorite output and planting their curatorial flag in the result.
Sure, they’ll get the finished product, and fast. But they’ll get none of the learning or discovery or rush of the beautiful act of testing, mistaking, mulling and fixing your way to the finished product, a little triumph. That’s the whole point of creativity.
It might be the whole point of being alive.
