As artificial intelligence grows ever more advanced, concerns over its potential to displace the human workforce are mounting. But, as Frances Hedges discovers, truly original thinking may be harder to replicate
‘IT’S A BLOOD AND GUTS BUSINESS, HERE AT MY desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.’ So said Nick Cave in a spirited defence of creativity issued in response to a fan using the language-processing tool ChatGPT to generate lyrics written in his style. ‘I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy,’ he conceded, ‘but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.’
His prediction was correct: the pace of change has only continued to increase. Between April and June this year, ChatGPT reached a record-breaking 100 million users, making it one of the most rapid-growth technologies in recent history. And in May, the online-education platform Chegg, which provides ‘homework help’ services, suffered a drop in share price of almost 50 per cent after it saw a wave of students abandon it in favour of ChatGPT or one of its competitors, such as Google Bard or Meta’s Llama 2. Still, the ability to plagiarise with ease is one thing; devising genuinely original material is quite another – and the jury is still out on whether large-language models can produce anything worthy of what Cave calls ‘the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value’.
Anxiety about the prospect of machines learning from – and eventually outwitting – humans has always been rife in our culture, but only relatively recently have we started paying serious attention to technology that could threaten what we might think of as our proudest endeavours. Ai-Da, the world’s first artist-robot, has presented us with ultra-realistic drawings and paintings; YouTube’s nascent AI-music channel now supplies us with automated tunes; and Midjourney has been adopted by video-game developers for its ability to turn out images and characters at speed. When Nike collaborated with Tiffany & Co to create a new pair of its Air Force 1 trainers in March, fans of the brand who were disappointed by the results turned to AI to demonstrate their claim that a machine could have come up with a better design. So is creativity a dying art?
‘I don’t think it’s as simple as asking machines for the answers,’ says Franki Goodwin, the chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, who nonetheless encourages her team to experiment with AI. ‘I find it helpful to talk about “assisted” rather than “artificial” intelligence, because that’s how it ought to be perceived
