How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Improve Creativity
First, ask the AI to design an economic system by which artists are fairly compensated for their labor. Use the AI to develop programs that feed, house, and provide medical care for artists while they engage in the time-consuming process of developing their craft. Creativity flourishes when artists can ascend a little higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Applying artificial intelligence toward solutions that give artists time and space to work without worrying about getting evicted or feeding their kids or covering a surprise medical bill would go a long way toward ensuring that creative people can devote as much of their attention and energy to creating new art.
Second, don’t worry about using AI to overcome creative blocks. All artists experience blocks, and they experience them for a reason. A creative block is a subconcious mechanism that alerts an artist that something is wrong in their approach to their work. The first step in overcoming a creative block is to respect it and understand that it is trying to tell you something. Frequently, a creative block signals that your ego has taken over the creative process. When you plot and obsess about how your work will gain you material success or acclaim, oftentimes the subconscious pouts, throws up a block, and punishes you for approaching your creativity in a transactional manner. One helpful tip on avoiding creative blocks is to speak respectfully of your artistic practice to other people. Express gratitude that you get to spend part of your brief existence in this reality painting or writing plays or making music. Practice confidence and patience in your creative process when it is slow and hard, and gratitude when it’s flowing.
Third, consider how you might express your creativity outside the context of the machine. Your creativity doesn’t have to stick to one medium. Artificial intelligence programs exist right now that can produce text-based and visual art. Rather than regarding this as an apocalyptic event for artists, consider how performance, sculpture, film, video games, and music can interface with generative AI and/or meld with other media to create entirely new art forms.
As technologies disrupt various artistic media, those media are displaced but never truly disappear. Artists still paint portraits over a century after the dawn of photography. Glass artists still blow glass and fiber artists still weave tapestries by hand long after technologies to automate those processes came along. Artists will be writing novels and painting pictures for as long as those activities provide an inherent spiritual reward.
I’m not worried that AI will make artists obsolete. But I also think we’re underestimating how radically AI is beginning to change civilization. We may very soon come to regard AI less as tools at our disposal than as a deities to petition. As gods take the forms of the prayers offered by worshippers, artificial intelligence will reflect the data set of human desires, motivations, and experiences. Articulating these desires, motivations, and experiences are precisely what artists do.
