How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Creativity
“Painting Is Dead”
In 1840, French painter Paul Delaroche reportedly declared, “From today, painting is dead,” upon seeing a photo produced by one of the earliest iterations of the camera.
This statement reflects the widespread anxiety among 19th-century artists toward photography—a mechanical process that was void of meaning, and a threat to traditional art.
Had Delaroche—a highly successful painter at the time—lived a decade or two longer, he’d have seen painting evolve from photo realism to the Impressionist era which began in the late 1860’s and early 1870’s.
Had he lived a century longer, he’d have seen the artistic influence of photography evolve into the widely recognized art form that it is today.
Resistance to innovation is not unique to photography. The printing press and recorded music faced similar accusations of being unethical shortcuts.
But, as history has shown, these tools didn’t mark the end of humanity’s creative spirit—they simply expanded its boundaries.
Today, artificial intelligence driven by large language models (LLMs) face similar criticism, particularly for writing. And yet it has the potential to improve creative writing.
Humanity’s Strength is AI’s Weakness
Best-selling authors relying on means beyond themself to write a book isn’t a new concept.
Robert Greene, best selling author of “The 48 Laws of Power” had Ryan Holliday as a research assistant. Ghost writers are becoming increasingly popular. Some ghost writers are in such high demand that they’re making 6-figure careers out of writing books for others.
These forms of creative aid are common and yet, uniquely different from using AI to research or write on your behalf.
A unique strength of human intelligence is the ability to ingest information, making meaningful connections across subject matter.
David Epstein, author of “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” puts it succinctly: “The unique strength of humans is our ability to integrate knowledge broadly, whereas AI has narrow specializations.”a
From personal experience, LLMs “smooth out” writing. If I ask it to write me an essay, it will. But without the proper prompting and guidance, it will spew a load of B.S. that is terribly dull, uninformed, and lacking in substance.
LLMs are unable to replicate the humanity and uniqueness in writing that only a human mind can create. A personal anecdote. Or a pop culture reference. Or a novel connection.
In other words, Chat GPT is vapid, and a regurgitation of the content its models were trained on. Anything it spits out is void of meaning. However, what humans think of, does have meaning.
Conclusion
I believe that AI has its time and place. What’s the purpose of your writing? Writing for the purpose of journaling is best done with pen & paper.
Fiction, I believe, can be done well using LLMs that have search capabilities, like Chat GPT search, which is capable of combining the web for specific information.
Whenever a new technological advancement converges with something crucial to the human experience like art, it gets scrutinized. It happened with the first camera.
Even the Gutenberg press had its own critics who argued that it would lead to an overproduction of low-quality books, despite it leading to the democratization of books.
Who knows, maybe the first primitive man to cook mammoth over fire had their own critics.
I don’t believe LLMs will replace human writing, because the creative spirit of man is too strong. Instead, we will harness this technology, leading to significant shifts in how we write.
— Grant Varner