Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.
I wonder how many parents are looking forward to the day their kids can just talk to a computer and have an LLM produce all the works. That'll be something to proudly hang on the fridge, yeah?
What if I used no AI in writing it i.e. it was all heartfelt but used AI to literally edit a video together? The author says
"Two videos, with different stories, shared so many similarities that most people thought they were roughly the same.
Same similar tone of voiceover with cadence. Same cutscenes of flying over empty beaches, and navigating forest trees and stars/universe, and same narrative: after years of evolution scientists have yet to discover the power of such love with a national geographic tone in both (one of the videos even started with that logo)."
Which to me, just means the manually done cutscenes was a waste of time? In fact in most situations pre-AI you'd foist this task on "that one friend" who's good with Movie Maker or hire a hobby videographer. Now I offload to AI, why is that bad?
I think having Claude wholesale write a wedding speech is obviously silly, but the rest doesn't seem so black and white, just more Ikea-fication of consumer art.
> if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended
As would I. Not only would that demonstrate they don't care, but it would also indicate that this "friend" simply doesn't know me at all, and therefore is an acquaintance at best.
I can't even imagine doing this. It's not that hard to make a special video once you've collected the source material. It won't look professional at all, but nobody cares about that at a wedding.
My conclusion is that this in not the end of creativity but an increasing premium on creativity that is certified to be human made. It’s like how if I cook something from scratch that’s considered more meaningful than if I simply heated frozen food or ordered in for a guest.
AI is merely exposing an already existing tendency. the creative output of the average non professional will always tend to the mean. it’s a tautology, that’s what the mean is. professional artists are treasured most of all for their _taste_, which tends to be novel and deliberate. the input of good taste into the Gaussian cloud of the average pulls it into new directions. the idea is in fact to improve the mean, that’s artistic education on a societal scale.
on the subject of AI, though: it definitely aggravates this trend.
I don't really like describing it as "taste", but I'll roll with it. (I dislike it because it's sort of an elite-coded rich person phrase in my experience. Also, everyone THINKS they have taste.)
The thing about taste is that it's not something that's in-built, it's something you develop. Through working on things and failing. I don't think you can develop good taste by hitting regen a bunch or extra-special prompting.
To echo your point—the “from the dawn of existence, up to this moment” framing seems to me a fairly familiar way for amateurs to reach for gravitas, in wedding speeches in particular, and especially between partners both of a certain social milieu…
I wonder how much creativity matters for this type of work.
I’m reminded of iPhoto’s little chintzy auto-generated reminiscence movies. Nobody confuses those “Ken Burns Effect” auto-slideshows with, well, Ken Burns’ work—much less art or creativity—but I still find myself moved to see my memories all hookered up in that format sometimes.
I think for something like this, creativity is actually a detriment. You're not going to win an award for an extra-special video, you don't really want to draw attention away from the couple towards your clever editing you know?
People are just trying stuff out! In the mid 90s I received several homemade clipart color inkjet greeting cards from relatives that had just gotten a computer. Trend didn’t last too long.
If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.
Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.
No, it's just like whenever something driven by media achieves a mean. Has happened before, will happen again.
At some point, outliers will appear. Most likely individual [human] creatives. They will create media that deviates from the mean.
Some will be great, and make the authors/artists successful. Some will be emetic garbage, and go down in flames.
Right now, I'm working on an app that has a fairly decent design language that was provided by a professional [human] designer. It's version 2. I don't have access to him, this time, so I have to make the changes, myself. I have a decent background in visual arts, myself, so I am able to do it, but the important thing, is to keep his [human] vision intact.
Someone I work with, keeps giving me designs developed by ChatGPT. They are ... not ideal. Pretty much middle-of-the-road milquetoast, that has no real soul. I'm trying to figure out how to bridge the basic interaction ideas of the suggestions (which are actually not bad), with the existing design language.
I have a theory: People are are less critical to GenAI, slop even, if it is content that is directly related to them.
For example, if a friend generates some silly AI video or photo of you or other, you're less likely to act negatively to that - than seeing some random slop.
This is something I've noticed a lot in different social groups of mine, like in various group chats.
I think a use case like that is still novel for non-tech people at the moment, but as the novelty wears off people are going to get sick of it pretty quickly and I think the social norm is going to settle on it being considered tacky. It's like using Comic Sans for a flyer. A lot of people will still do it, but a lot of people are going to roll their eyes.
Also, this is the kind of thing that you can't expect honest feedback on. IE, if your friends actually thought "this is pretty awful" they're not likely to say it, for the same reason you wouldn't remark that your friend's baby is ugly or whatnot.
Why did your group use the AI, how would you answer the Conclusion questions?
As an anectdote: I like low-fi punk music because of the energy, and low skill for entry level. So when I started playing music, I went for this genre. I used it as a hobby over 10 years as it brought me joy, and enjoyed the process, without the grind for leveling up the skill.
It's also fun to do low effort things that are good enough. Much more fun than being l33t.
when photography first dropped in the late 19th century it was also referred to as the enemy of creativity and it 50+ years for it to be recognized as a legit art form.
It's a weird title. AI lets ordinary people feel more creative than before. It's largely an illusion because of the problem outlined in the article: every video, image, blog post, or book written by AI is very same-y, especially if you don't start with a strong vision of your own.
But that's not the end of creativity. That's just a net increase in fake creativity. AI doesn't show up at your place and break all your brushes and easels. If you were a creative person before, you are under no compulsion to use the tech. My artist and writer friends have no plan to.
Now, the situation positively sucks if you're making money on commission, because you now have to compete with practically-free slop that, to most people, is good enough to put on a t-shirt. So I think it will have a negative impact on artists' incomes. But that's a separate story.
There's the thing. AI creates something that looks like quality, especially to an undiscerning audience. It ticks all the boxes of a professionally-made creation: composition, lighting, bokeh and so on. It takes humans a lot of time and practice to get to that level.
The problem is the lack of human intent. A stranger who never met the groom and bride could have created the same thing. It's shallow and impersonal, like a Hallmark card without a note in it.
There will always be creative people, and once we've seen enough AI-generated slop, we will come to value anything that doesn't look like it.
I think it's the feeling that this "superpower machine" is something that we little humans cannot compete with anyway. So we sort of trust it and use it.
I mean, video montages of pictures for birthdays/weddings/whatever were never creative to begin with. Before AI they were just some random template downloaded from a website or backed-in some editing software (I remember so many birthday montage videos made with Windows Movie Maker that looked all the same).
People love these not because they are creative or good executed, but because they see the pictures and the story of the people they love.
I think something half-baked by a non-expert hold more valuable human touch than the most perfect machine-generated result ever could. Not even in the same ballpark.
>Everyday creativity is aggressively regressing to a mean.
I don't see it that way. I see it as the routine and toil that we perceived as everyday creativity and professional work is getting compressed out like repetitive values and patterns out of a data set - that isn't surprising giving that the core nature of AI training is encouraging pattern recognition/generalization and producing internally de-facto a compressor and a decompressor as a result.
A human may have seen 10 instances of something with minor variations - and would think that is creative. AI after seeing it 1000000 times and generalizing accordingly - this is a recipe for producing a 1000 more with desired variations according to the specification.
That naturally doesn't end creativity. It just raises the perceived bar, which really has always been there, for what is real creativity.
The creative part was only the subject matter. The idea of making a video around "the 3 gifts" is itself kind of creative but fine-grained creativity has been lost.
It reminds me of the meme which shows a before and after of different company logos from like 15 years ago vs now... And now all the company logos look essentially the same; very similar fonts and colors.
People are afraid of creative designs because they are terrified of being judged. People don't want to step out of line.
It's like in a company environment; there are often many unspoken rules and taboos; if someone breaks them, they fall from grace rapidly.
These rules and taboos exist to preserve the structural integrity of the organization. A fragile organization needs lots of rules and taboos to be in place in order to remain cohesive. The people who lead these organizations create the rules and taboos which will allow them to stay in charge. People who don't adhere to the unspoken rules are quickly removed, often with the implicit consent of all group members who are themselves captive to the same rules and taboos and who eventually learn to pride themselves on compliance.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.
[delayed]
I wonder how many parents are looking forward to the day their kids can just talk to a computer and have an LLM produce all the works. That'll be something to proudly hang on the fridge, yeah?
What if I used no AI in writing it i.e. it was all heartfelt but used AI to literally edit a video together? The author says
"Two videos, with different stories, shared so many similarities that most people thought they were roughly the same.
Same similar tone of voiceover with cadence. Same cutscenes of flying over empty beaches, and navigating forest trees and stars/universe, and same narrative: after years of evolution scientists have yet to discover the power of such love with a national geographic tone in both (one of the videos even started with that logo)."
Which to me, just means the manually done cutscenes was a waste of time? In fact in most situations pre-AI you'd foist this task on "that one friend" who's good with Movie Maker or hire a hobby videographer. Now I offload to AI, why is that bad?
I think having Claude wholesale write a wedding speech is obviously silly, but the rest doesn't seem so black and white, just more Ikea-fication of consumer art.
> if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended
As would I. Not only would that demonstrate they don't care, but it would also indicate that this "friend" simply doesn't know me at all, and therefore is an acquaintance at best.
I can't even imagine doing this. It's not that hard to make a special video once you've collected the source material. It won't look professional at all, but nobody cares about that at a wedding.
My conclusion is that this in not the end of creativity but an increasing premium on creativity that is certified to be human made. It’s like how if I cook something from scratch that’s considered more meaningful than if I simply heated frozen food or ordered in for a guest.
AI is merely exposing an already existing tendency. the creative output of the average non professional will always tend to the mean. it’s a tautology, that’s what the mean is. professional artists are treasured most of all for their _taste_, which tends to be novel and deliberate. the input of good taste into the Gaussian cloud of the average pulls it into new directions. the idea is in fact to improve the mean, that’s artistic education on a societal scale.
on the subject of AI, though: it definitely aggravates this trend.
I don't really like describing it as "taste", but I'll roll with it. (I dislike it because it's sort of an elite-coded rich person phrase in my experience. Also, everyone THINKS they have taste.)
The thing about taste is that it's not something that's in-built, it's something you develop. Through working on things and failing. I don't think you can develop good taste by hitting regen a bunch or extra-special prompting.
To echo your point—the “from the dawn of existence, up to this moment” framing seems to me a fairly familiar way for amateurs to reach for gravitas, in wedding speeches in particular, and especially between partners both of a certain social milieu…
I wonder how much creativity matters for this type of work.
I’m reminded of iPhoto’s little chintzy auto-generated reminiscence movies. Nobody confuses those “Ken Burns Effect” auto-slideshows with, well, Ken Burns’ work—much less art or creativity—but I still find myself moved to see my memories all hookered up in that format sometimes.
I think for something like this, creativity is actually a detriment. You're not going to win an award for an extra-special video, you don't really want to draw attention away from the couple towards your clever editing you know?
People are just trying stuff out! In the mid 90s I received several homemade clipart color inkjet greeting cards from relatives that had just gotten a computer. Trend didn’t last too long.
"End of creativity". Nice bait.
If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.
Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.
No, it's just like whenever something driven by media achieves a mean. Has happened before, will happen again.
At some point, outliers will appear. Most likely individual [human] creatives. They will create media that deviates from the mean.
Some will be great, and make the authors/artists successful. Some will be emetic garbage, and go down in flames.
Right now, I'm working on an app that has a fairly decent design language that was provided by a professional [human] designer. It's version 2. I don't have access to him, this time, so I have to make the changes, myself. I have a decent background in visual arts, myself, so I am able to do it, but the important thing, is to keep his [human] vision intact.
Someone I work with, keeps giving me designs developed by ChatGPT. They are ... not ideal. Pretty much middle-of-the-road milquetoast, that has no real soul. I'm trying to figure out how to bridge the basic interaction ideas of the suggestions (which are actually not bad), with the existing design language.
I look at This Is Colossal [0] and see how art and creativity is alive and fresh as ever. There is no end to creativity.
[0] https://www.thisiscolossal.com
You are arguing that creativity is still alive by showing creative works from before AI? I think your argument is backwards.
Nice site! I think it will always be there, but the world is noisier and noisier, and it gets hard to hear human voices.
Why are the creators giving away creative decision making and then complaining about us collectively losing creativity?
I am a and work alongside AI native creatives every day and the decisions we make still are our own.
I decide, AI executes (mostly, far faster than I can).
I have a theory: People are are less critical to GenAI, slop even, if it is content that is directly related to them.
For example, if a friend generates some silly AI video or photo of you or other, you're less likely to act negatively to that - than seeing some random slop.
This is something I've noticed a lot in different social groups of mine, like in various group chats.
I think a use case like that is still novel for non-tech people at the moment, but as the novelty wears off people are going to get sick of it pretty quickly and I think the social norm is going to settle on it being considered tacky. It's like using Comic Sans for a flyer. A lot of people will still do it, but a lot of people are going to roll their eyes.
Also, this is the kind of thing that you can't expect honest feedback on. IE, if your friends actually thought "this is pretty awful" they're not likely to say it, for the same reason you wouldn't remark that your friend's baby is ugly or whatnot.
> What is driving us towards these tools?
Why did your group use the AI, how would you answer the Conclusion questions?
As an anectdote: I like low-fi punk music because of the energy, and low skill for entry level. So when I started playing music, I went for this genre. I used it as a hobby over 10 years as it brought me joy, and enjoyed the process, without the grind for leveling up the skill.
It's also fun to do low effort things that are good enough. Much more fun than being l33t.
when photography first dropped in the late 19th century it was also referred to as the enemy of creativity and it 50+ years for it to be recognized as a legit art form.
That said, some people like taking snapshots.
Doesn't put creative effort into video editing.
Complains about end of creativity in edited video.
Ok?
It's a weird title. AI lets ordinary people feel more creative than before. It's largely an illusion because of the problem outlined in the article: every video, image, blog post, or book written by AI is very same-y, especially if you don't start with a strong vision of your own.
But that's not the end of creativity. That's just a net increase in fake creativity. AI doesn't show up at your place and break all your brushes and easels. If you were a creative person before, you are under no compulsion to use the tech. My artist and writer friends have no plan to.
Now, the situation positively sucks if you're making money on commission, because you now have to compete with practically-free slop that, to most people, is good enough to put on a t-shirt. So I think it will have a negative impact on artists' incomes. But that's a separate story.
The vows were also AI generated.
And a computer would make a more efficient and less error-prone officiant.
> people loved them
There's the thing. AI creates something that looks like quality, especially to an undiscerning audience. It ticks all the boxes of a professionally-made creation: composition, lighting, bokeh and so on. It takes humans a lot of time and practice to get to that level.
The problem is the lack of human intent. A stranger who never met the groom and bride could have created the same thing. It's shallow and impersonal, like a Hallmark card without a note in it.
There will always be creative people, and once we've seen enough AI-generated slop, we will come to value anything that doesn't look like it.
I think it's the feeling that this "superpower machine" is something that we little humans cannot compete with anyway. So we sort of trust it and use it.
I think if AI has taught us anything, it’s that we over-indexed on human creativity in the first place. True creativity is rare, and often accidental.
It might be rare, but it's anything but accidental. Real creative people work hard on it. It's why they find AI so offensive.
I mean, video montages of pictures for birthdays/weddings/whatever were never creative to begin with. Before AI they were just some random template downloaded from a website or backed-in some editing software (I remember so many birthday montage videos made with Windows Movie Maker that looked all the same).
People love these not because they are creative or good executed, but because they see the pictures and the story of the people they love.
I think something half-baked by a non-expert hold more valuable human touch than the most perfect machine-generated result ever could. Not even in the same ballpark.
>Everyday creativity is aggressively regressing to a mean.
I don't see it that way. I see it as the routine and toil that we perceived as everyday creativity and professional work is getting compressed out like repetitive values and patterns out of a data set - that isn't surprising giving that the core nature of AI training is encouraging pattern recognition/generalization and producing internally de-facto a compressor and a decompressor as a result.
A human may have seen 10 instances of something with minor variations - and would think that is creative. AI after seeing it 1000000 times and generalizing accordingly - this is a recipe for producing a 1000 more with desired variations according to the specification.
That naturally doesn't end creativity. It just raises the perceived bar, which really has always been there, for what is real creativity.
The creative part was only the subject matter. The idea of making a video around "the 3 gifts" is itself kind of creative but fine-grained creativity has been lost.
It reminds me of the meme which shows a before and after of different company logos from like 15 years ago vs now... And now all the company logos look essentially the same; very similar fonts and colors.
People are afraid of creative designs because they are terrified of being judged. People don't want to step out of line.
It's like in a company environment; there are often many unspoken rules and taboos; if someone breaks them, they fall from grace rapidly.
These rules and taboos exist to preserve the structural integrity of the organization. A fragile organization needs lots of rules and taboos to be in place in order to remain cohesive. The people who lead these organizations create the rules and taboos which will allow them to stay in charge. People who don't adhere to the unspoken rules are quickly removed, often with the implicit consent of all group members who are themselves captive to the same rules and taboos and who eventually learn to pride themselves on compliance.
I don't understand that point of the story.
It's essentially, "We both used the same iMovie template because neither of us are creative."