“Every time there is a new technology, there is a paranoid faction of less than brilliant artists who feel that that’s the end of their career; who don’t understand that art never dies; that technology will go on and serve art.” – Stan Winston, 1993
I’ve always been fascinated by creative journeys. When people create something amazing I want to know how they got there. Technology always plays a role. Creativity comes from understanding how to augment our vision with technology, from ink to notation to paint to film to pixels.
Creative work is about being able to express your vision in a way that the rest of humanity can appreciate. Technology is how we get there as humans, whether it’s through the mechanisms of writing, music, painting, photographing, coding, and a multitude of other pursuits. These are just the ways that we tell our stories, not the vision itself.
We chase our dreams through technology. We are always pushing it to see where it can take us. AI is just the latest chapter of this journey.
No matter what I’m doing I’m always frustrated with the limits of the technology to express my creative vision. I’ve probably come closest to my ideals with my photography and my writing, but in both cases, I still struggle to tell stories that I cannot capture or express.
The limiting factor is me messing things up with the technology of words or the photographic process. In both cases, digital has closed the gap between my vision and reality. However, even there, I still run up into blind alleyways, where I just can’t seem to make it work.
AI presents a unique opportunity and challenge. It extends our creative capacities even further by taking mundane tasks off the table. I can use it to help me write. I’m using it right now to dictate this into my phone. I will use it to edit and polish this blog before I publish it.
The latest iteration of this struggle is using AI to code a prototype of the Knowledge Navigator. Ironically, my creative vision is for a technology that helps others clarify theirs. However, until AI, I lacked the tools to execute this vision.
I have never been a very good coder. I understand how it works, but I get lost and frustrated with the details of passing my thoughts into something the machine can understand. Computers are far more particular about details than I am.
I am trying to use AI to overcome those mundane detail-oriented tasks, which limit the execution of my vision. As a result, I have made more progress in a month than I likely would have in a year of reading coding manuals.
Using AI, I have learned more about coding in the last month doing it this way than I have in the last 30 years. Now I will admit that I already have a fair foundation in how code works, but it’s different to have a theoretical knowledge of something than to have a practical knowledge in using it to create something new.
This is not “cheating” or “taking the easy way out,” as some have argued. You are cheating if you’re not learning. You are cheating if you’re not growing. You are cheating if you’re not innovating. Learning, growing, and innovating all stem from the basic human impulse to create and explore. AI can supplant us, but not if we use it to learn and grow.
Almost all criticisms of how AI is disrupting society come from contexts where creativity isn’t the main goal, like standardized testing or corporate output. That’s a different conversation than what we’re having here. These are disruptions to systems, not humans.
Systems drive us with extrinsic motivators like money or grades. AI challenges extrinsic motivators, but that gives us a chance to realign our systems around intrinsic learning and creativity.
The intrinsic motivation of most students is usually clouded if not eliminated by the extrinsic motivators of grades. The purely extrinsic motivation of a quick buck creates fake art. There is no intrinsic creative motivator there. There is no creative growth there, only mindless replication.
The industrial mindset is based on mindless replication. Over the last two centuries, we’ve learned to mass produce all sorts of things. I argued in Discovering Digital Humanity that we have learned to serve machines. This is not a good role for humans.
Those of us particularly sensitive to creative thought struggle to exist in this kind of world. We are naturally non-conformist and resist becoming part of mindless machines. We recognize that only humans can truly create.
Humans are naturally curious, but extrinsic motivators dull that curiosity because it is considered a luxury not a necessity in a paradigm where we are taught to be cogs in machines.
In a world where AI is omnipresent, creativity rooted in curiosity is no longer optional, it’s essential. We must inject that creative drive into our learning and working. This is the antithesis of industrial thinking because if you are just part of the machine, creativity is a liability. You don’t want a cog spinning at its own speed
I am not an AI accelerationist. I don’t tend to get excited by any technology. I get excited about what technologies can do for me to help me grow and to make the world a more interesting place.
AI offers vast potential to augment our creativity. But like any technology, we must use it with that end in mind. If we do not, the machine will discard us. We must teach ourselves and our students to create with the machines.
What we’re doing with the technology is at least as important as what the technology does. The more powerful the technology, the more powerful the human element needs to be. AI is a powerful technology. Humans must be mindful in how they use it.
Mindfulness and creativity are deeply intertwingled. They infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. I can create photographs, writing, music, tools, and so much more to help other people through mindfulness. Without mindful creativity, we are little more than machines. With it, we can create with any technology to reach heights limited only by our own imaginations.