There's this notion out there that creative work will be one of the last things to be replaced by AI. I think this is because creativity feels like a "higher" form of intelligence. After all, it must be harder to get a compute to write a poem than to answer a factual question right?
Yet counterintuitively reality is suggesting the opposite. Creative work isn't looking like the last frontier for AI, its shaping up as one of the first domains to be truly transformed.
Why?
Creativity doesn't care about facts The probabalistic nature of AI models is a major weakness when it comes to factual accuracy, but it's a feature not a bug in the realm of creativity. The hallucinations are often what make it creative.
Creativity grows from experience A major element of creativity is pattern recognition and recombination. The more an AI models sees in its training data, the more raw material it has to work with and the more novel connections it can make. The more it's exposed to the world, the more richer its output will be.
Progress on all mediums
We're already seeing AI impact all formats.
Text = GPT-3
Photo = Style Transfer
Video = Motion Transfer
Audio = Speech Synthesis
And the pace of progress is accelerating, the question is not if AI will change creativity, but how will humans fit into the new creative process.
Taste: The final frontier
Ken Kocienda, coined the term "Creative Selection" on his reflections on his work at Apple. It describes the iterative search process of finding the right idea by building, demonstrating and refining - all based on the deep understanding and taste of the people doing the work.
In the AI era, taste will be the most important creative skill. Our roles will shift from being the direct manipulators of the creative process to more as curators and descriminators. Less like painters and more like film directors.
Tomorrow's creative tools will look more like Google than Photoshop. You'll search for ideas, refine them and combine them.
With models like GPT-3, you can already explore a whole space of ideas in seconds. You just set it off with a prompt and it can instantly generate 10 versions of an idea, some of which you'd never imagined yourself. It's as if the model can dip into the collective consciouness and pull out salient ideas and phrasings.
Our job? Apply creative selection, pick the best direction and run with it.