The rising usage of AI in Creativity is a perfect stand-in for what is in my opinion the biggest risk facing Industry and Business today: the acceptance of substandard solutions, and the concomitant rise in mediocrity along with the loss of domain expertise. This is readily apparent in the content space on any social media nowadays with the advent of AI written posts filling our feed. Now, apparently you don’t need real skill to write a post – this is worrying. While AI is a great equaliser, unplanned- it can be a greater destroyer of skills.
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This is not an article about creativity and usage of AI – rather, it uses this field due to the author’s profession of being in Advertising as well as in AI Software companies as a Fractional CMO to raise a fundamental issue relating to this industry – the rising acceptance of the mediocre. AI in the field of creativity needs a dedicated treatment – but here, I analyse mediocrity through the lens of AI usage in arts, given by twin reality of being an advertising professional and an amateur poet and writer.
Testing the Premise: AI in Creativity
The question isn’t whether AI will succeed in the field of creativity – but let us, by all means, start there and look at this question first, to analyse its prospects using admittedly anecdotal evidence of my own usage of AI in creativity. Well, I am a poet with my own poetry page, and head-strategy in an ad agency, and a writer on my 14-year-old blog. Wrt arts and AI, have been actively using AI in my writing, and seeing Ai in creative fields. Ai will most likely not crack that code, for art does not happen in the hands and body mechanisms - it happens somewhere deep in a "spandan" in the heart, and a vague discomfort or idea deep inside the brain. But let leave that aside – that is another question for another article.
1. Inside creative activities - You need domain knowledge to achieve excellence through AI. You need to know the art of colours, of how they will come in print, in digital; you need to be aware of painting styles, brush strokes, framing and a lot more. AI is used extensively, but those using it best are experts, actual painters, designers etc with stellar resumes. It really isn’t AI as much as a fantastic human artist bringing out his or her art. AI can’t replace it; it can only synthesize.
2. Inside Poetry : The AI style is clearly intelligible - it lacks the punch - and comes out as an imitation. I have tried to train some tools to write poetry in my signature, but useless. It is good as suggesting words, checking poetic meter, and such administrative activities post the actual creation of the poem. Flat-out, useless. Sorry, guys. (PS - Poety blog predates AI, just saying)
3. Writing : So far, the finest use case - but here, it lacks the four elements I shared earlier - like contextual awareness, situational reasoning, insight, judgement etc. Even in highly technical writing like strategy creation, which I have to do literally daily for my ad agency clients, or economics or trade or other topics where I use it. The insight is either mine, or from team brainstorming, or from in-depth research - not AI. And again, we use AI extensively. It is the human brain, the prompt and conversation that matters. Even in project execution - an MTech Engineer can create a full project using Claude premium - true story there (One team delivered a 100-Cr+ project using AI + team of topflight software architects in my awareness). Again - the human expertise counts. Again - sorry guys. Ground reality.
Why Creativity Resists AI
As you can see from the above, imho the likelihood is it won’t be dominating the creative fields. As it happens, in my personal experience, being creative isn’t going inward and finding inspiration deep inside you – this is the biggest myth perpetrated by non-creative folk, again imho. It is more of an outward expression of the internal mental state at that particular point of time. And that is why it is, in my opinion, impossible for AI to duplicate this - I know, I have tried multiple tools for poetry synthesis. If it doesn’t come from my innermost, it does not reach that level that I want it to. Like one of my poems - "Darakht" - came to me as I was riding home in a huge storm, and saw a tree holding out against the wind. This isn’t an aside – it is central to human performance, the concept of the internal reality
AI can reproduce the external characteristics of artistic expression. It can replicate the words a writer or a poet uses; it can form paragraphs and more. It can potentially become extraordinarily good at doing so. But reproduction of the characteristics of an emotional experience is not necessarily the same thing as having the experience that generated the art. And it certainly is not the same thing as visualising that creative output in your minds’ eye before the act of actual creation begins – the initial “spandan” And the bigger aspect of this – it is certainly not, as I said above, creative, and neither is it in any way a guarantee of output quality – keep this last point in mind. We shall return to it later.
Perhaps the most critical observation I have is in poetry - as an example, AI tries to march the meter of the poem in all lines - and there are situations when you decide as a creator that your contextual and situational need is stronger for the meaning rather than the meter of the poem - .... or for a line you sacrifice the flow for the same reason and you consciously decide to forget the meter or flow for that line. AI just cannot understand that, it just c.a.n.n.o.t. AI can be taught the rule. It can even be taught to break the rule. What remains questionable is whether it understands why this particular rule should be broken here.
Ai lacks context, insight, judgement, situation. And the brain contains hundreds of terabytes of data and process much faster than any technology can attain in all but speed - bandwidth, spacial capability and more, I could do on and on. AI in creativity won’t sustain quality - it will hit a price / cost barrier - long discussion - and a capability barrier and hence business houses will move to a Human + AI model. AI cannot sustain creativity minus the minus the human -so this is a doomsday scenario that won’t happen. This is not the biggest risk facing us – that lies elsewhere! Read on, please.
The Real Risk: A Market for Mediocrity
Now I am a serious doer in terms of my poetry - and let me tell you, the serious ones will continue to do the same as before - the creative person is not driven by external stimuli, but my internal compulsions - and there AI will have zero or close to zero impact, for these people are driven by emotions, not logic. I know - I am one of them. I may be good at it, I may be bad at it, but I am one of them. For example, my poetry is on Advait Vedant, & Human relationships, neither is going to be hit by AI. And this is where the biggest catch is first identifiable – these creative persons’ outputs will be materially different from the soulless creations made by AI. And therein lies the catch. But the issue is the market for such excellence will not or rather may not be the same, or is at risk of being mediocritised.
AI may commoditise content. It may even commoditise a very large amount of what we currently call creative output. But commoditising output is not the same as commoditising the human impulse to create. And the latter is what serious art is fundamentally about. And this is where we connect to the larger point – replace art and creativity with any human activity – and you get the same result. A clear difference between the passion and dedication of human effort against the AI output which will by definition lack a deep soul.
To Be Clear: Where AI Actually Helps
Understand - it is not my position that AI has no use in creative – or any - arena; only that the usage in most areas is completely at variance with what some technologists understand. We use AI extensively in our Ad Agency; I use AI extensively for strategic research for our agency clients - but I use that as a backup, with more traditional research (surveys, info gathering, reviews, testimonials, customer conversations, field visits, website deep dives into competition etc). In my technical writing, Ai is used - but the idea, content pitch, content flow, bulk of the information etc is mine or my teams'.
In each use case, at the centre is someone with deep domain expertise. Like that top-4 company CTO friend who stunned me by delivering a 100-Crore project with a slim staff and AI. That was my brutal reality check when I started out going deeper. The team had deep domain knowledge - I know as I am a C-Assembly-HTML programmer. I tried to my hand at it - failed miserably. That is my single point - domain expertise is now mandatory, and deep knowledge of on ground real-world processes and operations
Enter: AI Slop
There is, however, one major caveat - take poetry. The AI output will appear to be much better or as good as human output to someone who is not into that specific type of poetry ... and that is dangerous, for the output is substandard, yet is considered good enough - and that risks a lot of activity being tainted. We call it AI Slop - that is real, it is happening, and it is a serious threat to AI adoption itself – as more and more people start using AI, without regard to what their core skills are. And this is where we came in – the acceptance of the average over the excellent places us at deep risk of humanity inculcating a habit for mediocrity – something that is against every second of human existence throughout history. Our pursuit of excellence is what has defined us as humans – and we place this at risk.
The Feedback Loop
Talking of the take on content where we started out – look at this in this way - AI produces plausible content → inexperienced person accepts it as good → more such content gets published → audiences become accustomed to that standard → the standard itself declines → future AI is trained/evaluated against increasingly mediocre material. Thus, while content is democratised in a fashion, it comes at the cost of the pursuit of excellence in that field. And that is a definite cause for worry. AI increases access to knowledge, enables growth to higher levels – but critically it also enables mediocrity. It behoves us to be exceedingly careful of where and how we implement AI lest we risk the habit of excellence itself – and that is the doomsday confronting us!
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