Thoughts on the generative creative economy

I find it comedic how professional digital creative tools (video, music, design, etc.) in 2018 are still being mainly promoted as "tools for hand-crafted, artisanal creation" - while we are living in an age where bot-nets are producing and recommending artefacts by the trillions.



While the quality of creative artefacts generated with machine assistance is debatable - it is quickly getting "good enough" across many fields. Combined with other unique benefits of the generative model, traditional digital creative tools are becoming obsolete fast.



The outlines of the new creative economy are clear: 90% of all content will be machine generated (with little to no human intervention) and extremely cheap to buy. The remaining 10% will be artisanally made by humans, which focus mainly on branding and storytelling. Technologically, you don't need "AI" or very sophisticated machine learning for most of this to happen - good old creative computation (at massive scale) does the trick.

Finally, a note to the people saying "no worries, AI + creativity is all about empowering and augmenting human creators, there won't be blood". I've worked in this industry for years & find such talk intellectually lazy and at times even deceptive. There will be blood.



I am not questioning that AI can and is empowering some creators and enable wonderful new forms of creation - it will. But to see what happens with such tech when at industrial scale, one can look at fake-news and spam generation bots. That's a more realistic view of whats coming to all creative industries, operating under our current global economic paradigm.

The generative creative economy won't be a utopia by any stretch, but likely a messy hell-hole for many creatives - not unlike the situation right now. We have to actively shape this future by fighting vested interests in the system. Yes, human jobs destroyed through growing automation capabilities can be replaced with entirely new jobs. But it won't happen magically - its a major generational effort which requires deep investment in education and culture. Human creators need to be recognised, not hidden by AI. Under the current klepto-capitalist global system, that seems highly unlikely.

If we want more positive outcomes, the "why" needs to be addressed properly, beyond our current semi-pornographic obsession with the "how".

Follow up posts:

"Is this concern real or just doom & gloom? Is there a concrete example?":

https://samim.io/p/2018-05-26-my-recent-piece-thoughts-on-the-generative-ai-creative/

Thoughts on Botnets and Creativity:

https://samim.io/p/2018-04-23-the-solution-to-exploding-fake-news-and-spam-botnets-ca/

#Generative #Ideas