How does AI Impact Creativity?

In recent years, artificial intelligence has made extraordinary advancements that have revolutionized many aspects of our life, particularly in the world of creativity. AI is increasingly used by content creators, writers, artists and even in daily work tasks to generate ideas. From personal experience when working on a project, coming up with the first sentence of an essay or the structure of a presentation is often the hardest part of the entire process. Generally, once you have that outline or even just the first phrase, it makes it so much easier to complete. AI can be used to complete many specific tasks in the creative field. For example, artists and designers use AI to visualise concepts and musicians can experiment with different AI generated sounds to enhance their music and jumpstart projects. Using artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT to generate ideas is an attractive concept, but where are these ideas coming from, and is the product really novel?

Can AI actually generate its own ideas, or does it just rehash existing content imputed by humans? In a recent analysis written in a business journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania “Knowledge at Wharton,” the authors summarized the current research on AI and creativity. The results showed that when users work with artificial intelligence tools, it can improve the quality of their ideas, but decreases the diversity of ideas generated. One of the authors of the article, Christian Terwiesch, comments that “if you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other.” While using tools such as ChatGPT can be hugely beneficial on an individual scale, the use of the same key words drawn from the same mass of data will tend to provide similar results.

While these tools can cause the convergence of ideas, it can also expose to a multitude of viewpoints and experiences on a non-human scale. AI can draw on billions of different sources that a human would never be able to access. For example, imagine you wanted to paint the perfect sunset.Everyday, you decide to go outside and try to paint the sunset of that day. Finally, you paint over one hundred sunsets, and try your very best to compile all of the different sunsets into one. This process is extremely tedious and not very productive. AI on the other hand, could access tens of thousands of images of sunsets and put them all together in the time it takes you to read this sentence! The amount of sunsets that AI has access to is more than you will see in your entire lifetime.. It is true that the scope of ideas that AI can access and compile is beyond the practical limitations of one human’s brain However, it is also important to consider the argument that every sunset is different, and by compiling them all to create the supposed “perfect sunset” we lose the uniqueness of each individual perspective. The AI-generated, enhanced sunset produced is going to be very different from a sunset made with the uniqueness and creativity of the human mind.

This brings us to the efficiency of AI, and the concern that non-AI assisted creative work will become rarer. Many tasks in the creative world are extremely time consuming, whether it is editing a book, filming a video, or formatting an image, all of these can be more easily and quickly accomplished by AI. With artificial intelligence doing the mundane tasks, there is space left for the creators to focus on the more interesting, unique parts of their projects.  Take writers, for example: instead of agonizing over small grammar and sentence structure mistakes, they can use tools such as ChatGPT to correct those small errors, allowing them to spend more time on expanding their creative ideas further. 

All that being said, this could eventually be an issue, where people begin to rely heavily on these tools and lose the ability to problem solve or perform tasks that are traditionally a part of their craft. Ultimately, if we cease to input new human-synthesized inputs into the data that AI is drawing on, we may eventually create a stagnant pond of ideas. The more we rely on AI, the more we risk AI-outputs becoming less useful, and less people will be incentivized to put human effort into regenerating that information-pool.

Finally, there is the issue of intellectual property, and the concept that AI generated work removes the source of data and creativity from the output. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini are pulling data from all sorts of online resources, some of which are copyrighted and are being used without the original creator’s consent. Is it ethical to use information, analysis, or creative products without giving credit to the people who generated it? Should we be consuming and using data that might be given out freely without consent? It is very important to consider these questions in order to bring to light the ethical problems of AI.

To summarize, although artificial intelligence has become an enormous part of our everyday lives,its relationship with creativity is extremely complex. It can bring efficiency to the creative process and inspire new ideas, however it could also lead to lack of diversity in production and a decline in creativity. As a society, we must find a balance in order to use AI as a helpful tool instead of a crutch and we need better ways of understanding the pool of information AI is drawing on. AI is still a very new concept, and it is crucial that we take necessary actions so that humans and artificial intelligence can collaborate effectively without the loss of human creativity. Our end goal should not be to completely replace human creativity with AI, but instead enhance it through well thought-out collaboration.