Six months ago, AI was an existential threat. Now AI is meh
Turns out humans are more creative, after all
If you don’t count the “Hello, is this thing on” post from February, my first essay for MBH4H was published six months ago today. It was my response to Apple’s “Crush” ad and the furor it caused within the creative community.
In that essay, I confessed how I had originally thought Apple’s ad was quite clever when I first saw it but later came to realize that I was completely wrong, as many had taken “Crush” to represent the threat of technology companies—particularly AI—crushing the careers of human creatives. Apple, too, realized their error and took the rare step of apologizing.
Yet if Apple were to release “Crush” now, even just half a year later, I’m not sure it would garner quite the same reaction. Back in May—which honestly seems like a decade ago at this point—AI was widely regarded as an almost existential threat to the creative industry. Today, not so much, or at least, it seems that way to me. I think AI in general, and Generative AI in particular, has already become a tad passé. A bit meh.
This is partly because AI is already taking more of a background role, becoming more of a tool and less of a robot. AI is now integrated into smartphone operating systems to summarize notifications (with limited success) and create bizarre and sometimes disturbing photos. It has also been incorporated into more professional-grade digital creative tools like Photoshop to extend backgrounds, cut out people from backgrounds, etc. Over the past six months, the focus of AI seems to have shifted more towards taking care of mundane repetitive tasks and away from realizing our fears of it being used to create original work and replace human creatives in the process.
That’s partly because using AI to create original artwork or content, particularly in Hollywood, will likely be frowned upon by the industry and audiences alike (unless it’s used to create bonkers hallucinogenic videos of Gordon Ramsey in the kitchen or exploding cars and game show hosts which personally I cannot get enough of). Another reason that AI is still confined to the fringes of the creative industry is that it’s simply not that good; the vast majority of AI-generated work that I have seen is very generic and very AI-y. It takes an enormous amount of time and creative skill to make something truly remarkable, and the more half-assed attempts at creating something decent with a bare minimum of prompting are painfully obvious in their blandness.
Taking it as a whole, I simply don’t think AI has lived up to the hype of being either an existential threat to vast swaths of the creative industry, nor has it become that essential—not yet, at any rate, and certainly not enough to pay for it. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, it seems to become more boring.
For the past six months, we’ve been told that AI will get much better, become much more useful, and prove itself to be completely indispensable. Will it, though? And if so, when? And when it does, will enough humans pay for AI at anywhere near the levels required to justify the billions of dollars of investment? Some more people who are way more informed than me have their doubts. As do I, if I’m being honest.
Undeterred, AI companies continue to raise eleventy squillion dollars in funding and still seemingly have no qualms about moving fast and taking things in terms of creative content (and openly trolling The New York Times for publicity in the process). But despite the billions in funding and the gargantuan amount of training data (and power) needed to build it, the product itself still hasn’t yet set the world on fire, in either good ways or bad. The recent rollout of Apple Intelligence was somewhat of a nothing burger, and the product itself is hilarious for all the wrong reasons; Google’s incorporation of AI into search has been judged on a scale of meh to a fucking disaster, and although Google’s Gemini has millions of users it’s hard to know how many of those users are paying for it (Google haven’t released the figures); Marc Benioff called Microsoft's Copilot the new Clippy (most definitely not a compliment). OpenAI retains the lion's share of the funding, attention, and user base, but again, many of us are still asking, “Where’s the beef?”
Vinyl records don’t sound better; they feel better.
But it’s not all bad. There is one area where AI has had a profoundly positive effect, at least on me. The many misfires and generally tacky and awful GenAI content have made me appreciate just how good humans are at being creative. This is not just a Luddite reaction to technology; it’s more the somewhat ironic realization that writing about AI has helped me to define better what makes human creativity different from the artificial.
Over the last six months, I have paid more attention to the work created by artists, musicians, photographers, video game designers, graphic designers, writers, and filmmakers.
As I have written before, vinyl records don’t sound better; they feel better. Technology makes it easy to listen to any piece of music ever recorded just by asking your phone to play it. Yet listening to that same track or album on vinyl requires more intent, more effort: Everything from removing the album from the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, lowering the needle onto the record, and even turning it over at the end of side one. More to the point, I’d argue there’s an increasing desire for that tactile feel in other creative disciplines, a vinylfication if you will: shooting photos on film, drawing with charcoal or lead pencil, painting with real watercolors, writing notes in a notebook, or reading a printed hardback book. Analog tools are clearly a source of inspiration to a whole new generation of creatives who are using them to find their own style and inspiration beyond the digital tools they’ve grown up with.
I can’t say for sure that the appearance of AI is a driver of this, but I feel that it is.
Regardless, I’ve never been more inspired than by creatives being human: Fred Again sampling his arm banging on a desk in a live session, marveling at Dave McKean’s wonderful fusion of his hand draw art with his techniques in Photoshop, rewatching Pharell listen to to the raw version of Alaska by a 20-year old Maggie Rodgers and witnessing the literal moment that began her career, or immersing myself in the delightful hand-painted animation of the Wild Robot.
The plethora of art, music, fashion, photography, design, and writing I see created by humans for humans feels so much better than anything I have ever seen created by AI. Does that mean I won’t use AI either now or in the future? Not at all. I’m more than happy for AI to summarize my emails, make a spreadsheet, create an outline, or check my spelling. But will I have it make anything creative? Hell no.
AI is meh.
I will not be taking questions at this time.