AI Gets Creative

Welcome to Money Buff! Feel free to check out my other posts, and follow me on Twitter for more regular thoughts! For more about the hows and whys of investing, subscribe here:

Like flying cars, AI looked like just another extravagant futuristic vision from the 1960s—great for Hollywood, but far from reality. Things have changed dramatically in 2022.

In AI lately, that has been every week. These innovations are centered around the most impressive of human capabilities: our ability to create.

Over the weekend I dug into some of these tools. One of my favorites is the popular image generation tool, DALL-E. You type a prompt and it generates an image. Here’s a bernedoodle making some PB banana bread on Mars:

This good boy was generated in under 10 seconds. When new tools come along, new things are possible. Just as mobile gave rise to apps using technologies like GPS and cameras, generative AI is creating an industry of creative tools.

Beyond image generation, Google has developed both text-to-video and text-to-audio AI. Runway ML put out an incredible video showing off their latest advances. It blew me away:

As someone who likes to type words, I was particularly interested in how well a computer can write. After all, computers are playing chess and diagnosing diseases better than humans, so it’s only natural to wonder about writing.

Jasper, a popular AI writing tool, raised $125 million last week bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. My first thought was, “Is AI going to replace writers?” So I asked it.

Sounds like we’re in the clear for a while. But seriously…

Where does this all lead?

Every so often, we discover tools that transform the way billions of people create. As Alan Kay said:

Humans have always been defined by our tools — knives allowed us to hunt, needles to stitch fabric, and compasses to traverse oceans. Technology enables us to do more with less. And AI is no different.

I’m sure most of us expected a future where AI was present in some way. What we probably didn't anticipate was that our most sacred pastimes—art and writing, would be among the first disrupted.

AI-based creative tools will likely make their biggest impact in the commercial space. Consumers hardly care who created a logo, advertisement, or copy. If AI does these things better, it’s a no-brainer for companies.

Creative markets are always going to evolve. As tools improve, “regular” people are able to do what only very talented humans can do. Photoshop was the pariah destroying art. And before that it was photography. Now all of these tools exist in harmony. Just look at the iPhone 14 Pro camera. What has been true since the advent of art is still true now: new tools reshape the landscape of creativity.

Realistically, we will find a middle ground. Collaboration will be the name of the game. AI doesn't produce great prose unprompted, just like cameras don’t walk around taking great pictures.

The degree to which we elicit good results from our tools depends on how imaginative and skilled we are at manipulating inputs. In other words, interfacing with AI is a skill in itself.

We‘ll see a new kind of writer who only needs to imagine. AI writing tools allow these ambiguous ideas to take shape, and in less time. For better or worse, students are already using the technology to write essays and get straight As. Redditor innovate_rye said it like this:

For now, AI writing tools thrive on vanilla content like historic and keyword-centric topics, where generic facts are just repackaged or combined. There's no knowledge creation here. The low-hanging fruit gets picked first.

Articulating the human experience

An internet flooded with even more low-quality content is a scary thought. But this gives talented creators infinite opportunity. We celebrate writers who communicate meaning. Steinbeck, for example, illustrates the depths of human psychology in a single paragraph. An author's use of words to put you into their universe isn't something you can program into an algorithm.

AI is rooted in logic, thus devoid of human emotion. There's no experience behind the words. The only way to get that is to live life. Great writing captures what the human experience feels like—it’s a vibe that an AI cannot feel. In my last post, I described this uniquely human phenomenon:

Last weekend, I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts and I was floored thinking that everything originated in the human brain. It’s obvious but it is a subtle reminder of the power of the human spirit. Everywhere I looked was brilliant artwork that I couldn’t begin to create in a thousand lifetimes.

Would you go to an AI art museum? A place where computer-generated art is hung up and credit is given to the algorithm and prompt engineer. Is that still impressive?

Even if AI-generated content becomes irresistibly good, quality won’t always win out. Collectors are often buying the artist more than the art.

Nobody cares when two computers face each other in chess, despite them being more skilled than Magnus Carlsen.

Justin Bieber doesn’t have 3% of the world following him on Instagram for the music alone. He’s a star who people dedicate chunks of their lives to. It’s unlikely that the prompt engineer behind AI-generated music will be able to garner the same levels of fandom.

I’m hesitant to cast criticisms as this technology is still in its infancy. But some values are universal. We love works of human expression. Why? Because we’re human. We relate to the emotion, skill, and meaning behind it. We pay a premium for things that aren’t made by a machine. Creations connected to the actual touch of a human are objectively more inspiring.

Despite immensely impressive advancements, it feels like we’ve become accustomed to technological progress in the 2000s. Few things blow our hair back like using an iPhone or HDTV for the first time did. Many people think the years ahead will be epic for AI.

AI is going to change a lot of things. It almost goes without saying that the latest developments are impressive. But when it comes to creativity, which is so much about social salience and meaning, AI is fascinating yet unsatisfying.

We are going to see a surge of content and creativity. With aftershocks of excess and fakery. It is still very much infantile, like a baby repeating words before its brain fully develops.

But even if AI someday enables us to write like Steinbeck, produce like Spielberg, create like Picasso, and compose like Taylor Swift—will we care?

- Sam