Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable.
Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from now. Beyond that, the only general conclusion I can come to about AI and creative work is that AI tools are probably going to become a part of the regular creative flow of any writer or artist, and no one is even going to talk about it a great deal. Technologies like RSS, blockchain, and NFT are destined to become part of the scaffolding of the internet. I feel like something similar will happen to AI, and it will become part of our everyday workflows as much as anything else, and we won't talk about it.
Before AI becomes an integral part of our workflows, it will be something outside it. It will be something that gets pointed at and described as an alien presence. In the coming few years, we are going to have to make some choices. I recently read an article about how AI is probably not going to start creating art and writing stories anytime soon, but very probably there is going to come a time when AI-created artwork and AI-created writing are going to be on the bookshelf next to the human-written book and the human-created piece of art.
I am personally of the opinion that people are always going to prefer human-created art. But then again, I am old-fashioned. I am from the year 2024. Who knows what the future will bring? If you look at the way AI tools work, it is very simple. The AI looks at all that has been done so far, all that is being done, and then generates responses on the basis of an understanding that it has created on the basis of that. Now, bear in mind that I am using the word "understanding" a little reservedly because I am not of the opinion that AI actually understands anything. It is a generative system. It is like your predictive text on your phone, except that it is slightly more complicated than that. Instead of predicting the next word, it is predicting the next sentence, the next paragraph, and the entire meaning of the thing that it is working on. But it is still a system that is working on things that exist.
Human beings, to some extent, also do this. But human beings describe creativity as the ability to come up with new things. How far that is true, I am not sure. But we do seem to be the products of everything we have read and consumed and absorbed as creativity. People who consume literature and people who can read and people who can watch movies and documentaries and listen to podcasts—are we really being creative? I think there may be different opinions about this, but I don't think anyone will disagree with me when I say that there is a difference between stuff that is a result of pandering to trending topics and stuff that is original in that it takes a direction that other people have not previously gone in.
The AI can only generate what has already been generated. The AI can only work on things that are already in circulation. It can only build its future products on the basis of past products. What does this mean for our trending topics economy, our content creator economy, where everyone is making videos about whatever is working right now? It means that if you're a human being and you're creating your next video or writing your next book on the basis of whatever is working right now or whatever is trending in the market right now, you're probably going to be out of business. Because the AI can do it better than you and faster than you.
That was the USP that you were bringing to the table, wasn't it? What you were bringing to the table was the ability to look at what is happening and to quickly generate something that can add to that mass of content. AI can do that better than you now. AI will be able to do that even better than you in the days to come. So what is it that is going to make you stand out? What is going to make you stand out as a human creator is the ability, the willingness, and the caliber to take an original direction, to take a direction that others have not gone in before.
A lot of jobs that are on the bottom of the barrel, like SEO copywriting, for example, are gone pretty much even right now because AI can do it right now. AI is going to take a few more jobs in the days and months and years to come, which will be jobs that are predicated on the idea that if you follow whatever is happening in the market right now, you're going to do well. You may very well be someone who wants to do just that, and that is okay. But bear in mind that that particular line of work is going to be out of fashion pretty soon.
The only things that are, in my opinion, in my 2024 opinion, likely to continue to exist are things that are original, things that stand out, things that draw upon the human ability to break from tradition. It feels a little strange to say that AI is traditional, but the way AI is working right now is pretty much indistinguishable from people who only do things that have already been done. Because that is literally all AI is capable of: doing what has already been done.
Thank you for listening. I'll see you in the next one.
