Bollocks, I say. In defense of human voices.
There’s been a bit of a thing online lately where people are questioning the point of creative work, now that AI is replacing so many skilled craftspeople in the creative industries.
Fuck that.
If you’ll happily surrender your creative outlet because a machine can have a fair stab at whatever it is that you do, then you don’t have a creative bone in your body.
Creative expression is an addiction. You may as well tell a junkie to go cold turkey.
Creativity is not a job. It’s a calling. A primal urge. There’s no turning it off.
Will I stop writing novels now that ChatGPT can spit one out in thirty seconds? Not on your life.
Does it mean that my work will be lost in the tsunami of AI-written material that’s flooding the airwaves and drowning out real, human voices?
Quite possibly.
But will it stop me writing?
Never.
Creativity is a uniquely human trait.
Taking the spark of an idea and turning it into something totally new, simply for the joy of creating something, is the one thing that distinguishes us from all other creatures.
That’s not to say that animals don’t create remarkably beautiful things. Whales sing to one another from one side of the vast Pacific Ocean to the other. Male bowerbirds scour the undergrowth for iridescent blue trinkets to adorn their elaborate grass bowers. Even the humble toadfish creates mandala-like designs with their fins on the seafloor. But they do those things with a greater purpose; in most instances, to attract, or keep, a mate.
Because, of course they do. The things creatures will do for a date, right?
But human beings make things just for the sake of making them. It’s not about convenience or function. We do it just because.
Just because you can buy a pre-fab iced cake at Coles, if you love baking, do you go for that rather than making one yourself? Hell, no.
Sure, you can order a Richmond scarf online from Tigerland (shut up, haters). Does that mean you don’t have a go at whipping one up for the season opener if you’re a halfway decent knitter? Forget it.
Creativity will never die, because it comes as naturally to humans as breathing.
But can the creative industries survive the AI-generated assault it’s currently enduring? Well, that’s another question altogether.
Why are the creative industries in their sights?
I would genuinely like to know why the first industry the tech bros locked in their sights was the creative one. Why not direct their efforts towards curing cancer? Or solving the climate crisis? Perhaps because to them, true creativity is a puzzle to be solved.
We creatives were all a little too smug when AI first appeared on the scene, weren’t we? “Oh, they’ll never be able to replace us!” we all cried. “It’s just a tool! We can have fun with it, right?”
Wrong.
Instead, they came in the night and robbed us blind.
I was surprised by how violated it made me feel when I learned that four of my books had been downloaded onto LibGen, a pirated book database that was used to train AI programs.
It wasn’t just that my own work was being used to create a system whose primary aim is to make jobbing writers like me redundant. Though that is certainly a thing. It was because as any creative writer will tell you, our work means a great deal more to us than just words on a page.
Our souls are sandwiched between the covers of our books.
When I write something for pay — a piece of copy for a developer, a script for a documentary series, a pitch document for a feature film — it’s an exercise that primarily comes from my head. There’s a series of switches I’m conscious of flicking on and off to tap into a particular voice, tone, and lexicon to suit a specific job.
Those jobs are the ones that have kept the lights on while I work at the deeply personal, financially ruinous, work of being a novelist.
Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, you’re not raking it in as a novelist. It’s a labour of love. We take on all the risk. We work for years without pay and with no expectation that whatever it is that we’re writing will even end up being published. Speaking for myself, I have two full manuscripts on my laptop that most likely will never see light of day.
Yes, we all want to find an audience and are incredibly grateful when we do, no matter its size. But the returns are so microscopic, there’s no expectation that sales and royalties will ever pay the bills.
And there’s the rub. The jobs that have been subsidising my creative work are drying up because the work of many thousands of writers like me has been plugged into a system that is designed to stop us earning a crust. In the past twelve months, what was a flood of work that had been keeping me liquid for more than ten years has dried to barely a trickle.
It’s heartening to know that the Australian government, at least, is doing something to stop this happening in the future. The unfortunate part of that? For many of us, the horse has already bolted, been snatched up by the neighbouring farmer, and is hitched to his wagon.
Worst of all, there’s no action for creatives in other art-forms who are also being ripped off by the AI beast.
This may be the winning argument for programs like Ireland’s recently enacted Basic Income for the Arts. As creative artists’ bread-and-butter jobs disappear, it provides a solid base to build from.
Practice makes perfect
I’ve heard plenty of people put forward the argument that it’s no different from the very many times in human history that technology has sent industries packing.
No doubt Thomas the Tank Engine’s stoker was pretty pissed when the diesel train first appeared on the horizon. If he was of a certain age, he would have taken a package and, well, quite possibly taken up a creative pastime in his retirement that had nothing to do with his profession. If he was younger, he would have re-skilled and moved into a new industry.
But the thing with creative work is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. The wedding singer might prefer to poke her eardrums out with knitting needles than sing “Horses” at yet another suburban wedding. But every time she does, she’s improving her voice, and her stage performance. And that feeds into the gigs she does in front of three people at a bar in Northcote. One day, it may be the foundation of what will be a long, and brilliant, career as a singer.
It’s the same for me. Writing-on-demand has been my apprenticeship. Every pitch I write for a drama series. Every description of an apartment complex I write for a website. Every script I write for a documentary. Every article I’ve written. They’re made to order. They must fit a brief. My creative skills are on a leash. But every job has made me the writer I am today. They have made me faster, more efficient, and more confident.
What of the emerging creatives whose only engagement with the nuts and bolts of the industry will be crafting careful prompts for AI to spit out something they once would have made themselves? What will that mean for them as they try to find their own voice?
Creativity will never die.
We’re born with the urge to create. Anyone who’s seen a baby spreading its mushed carrot over its dinner tray can tell you that.
It comes down to the gesture. Our ability to make a mark.
That urge, I’m sure, comes from our sense of mortality. It’s our way of leaving something behind; something that bears witness to our passing through this world.
When I was a small human, and an agnostic one at that, I decided that the Old Testament tale of the Garden of Eden was a story about the evolution of human consciousness. Yes, I was a peculiar child.
To me, it was about the loss of innocence when our early hominid ancestors decided that hanging about in the jungle eating roots and leaves was boring as fuck, what with all that vast savannah out there. Then came the opposable thumb, and we were — quite literally — off and running.
That was the getting of wisdom. But it came at a cost. Because we quickly became aware of our impotence in the face of natural forces, and our mortality. Magic, ritual, and religion are how we try to deal with the former. Creativity — the making of marks and leaving behind testaments — is how we try to cope with the latter.
Creativity is much more than that, though.
As a race, if you strip away our intellect, human beings are pathetic. Useless teeth and nails to defend ourselves in a fight. Our hopeless babies can’t walk for a year. We can’t even outpace a wombat — they run four times faster than most of us. Add to that, no body hair to keep us warm. So, yeah.
The main reason we’ve thrived? The fact that we band together and look after each other. We’ve been able to develop complex and large brains because our mums carry us around for a ridiculous amount of time. They also give us high-energy breastmilk that go towards brain growth rather than limbs that would otherwise have us running around minutes after we’re born, which is normal for most mammals.
The other thing our hominid ancestors got from being carted around by their mothers for so long? Communication skills. Up-close facial expressions and sounds. The first humans developed complex communication because they were physically and emotionally bound to their mothers.
Communication and connection are key to human existence. It’s why social media has thrived. It taps into an evolutionary trait that’s been essential to our survival as a species.
That’s why creativity is such a big thing for us.
We make because we must.
We want to fight mortality and prove we were here.
But we also need to touch other people and hold them close. Whether that’s through words on a page, images on a screen, or a jumper knitted for a grandchild.
We want to make things that touch other people, because that connection is what holds us together.
It’s the thing that makes us, well… us.
We must fight to keep that instinct healthy and strong.
Without it, we are only skin-bags stuffed with blood, bone and meat.
And that is not who we are.
At least, it’s definitely not who I am.
