Analysis: DCU's Vlad Glaveanu and Constance de Saint Laurent look at the fears around AI and ask if it really will threaten human creativity
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN artificial intelligence have provoked passionate debates about what it means for our future. From the hopeful – ChatGPT will turn us into productive geniuses – to the alarmist – sentient machines will replace us all – there is no shortage of extreme predictions. And, when some of them come from the very people who developed these AI models, it is hard not to get swooped in.
Humanising the machine The first assumption is that artificial intelligence is intelligence, as it exists in humans and other species. The human tendency to anthropomorphise what we can’t explain or understand makes us see intentions, feelings, or rationality in what may be only mechanistic, statistic or simply random.
Similarly, if AI can help brainstorm fantastic ideas or create mesmerising artwork, it is because the Internet is bursting with human creativity. It is the place where we share our ideas, display our art and archive what has been done in the past. As mind-blowing as it is to see image generators like Dall-E or Midjourney produce personalised content, searching the same terms on Google Image is often as impressive, if not more.
Ultimately, human creativity relies on much more than the surprising combination of existing information, which is something AI can do; it depends also on social processes such as empathy and perspective-taking. Famously, these are not strong points of Generative AI. There is a lot of room for optimism regarding what human–AI collaborations can do for creativity and the creative industries. A recent manifesto on this topic, published by leading scholars in the oldest creativity journal, is positive in this regard. And yet, to make the most of this promise, we need to be better informed about what AI actually is, what it can do, and what makes human creativity ‘human’.
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