AI makes us creative

There’s a joke I heard a while back which occasionally comes to mind.

It goes something like this: “Have you heard of the brown bear effect? It’s when you’re living your normal life doing normal things and everything is normal. Then you’re talking to someone and they go ‘have you noticed that big shaggy brown bear that’s been hanging around town lately’ and then suddenly it seems like every time you turn your head - there it is - and it’s like the bear’s following you around.”

Maybe this topic is my personal brown bear, but lately I can’t help but feel like the people around me are getting more in touch with their creative side.

A few friends of mine are big into music. One is making a big career change to produce and create music. A good handful of them are DJs on the side.

Another friend is taking a break from working and has gotten into pottery in a serious way. He’s really, really good. I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of a few pieces.

One person is redoing her home interior bit by bit.

Another friend has really gotten into woodworking. I’m constantly getting factoids about the different types of woods he’s been playing with and I’m pretty sure his place is going to cross the threshold to being majority self-made-furnished before long.

A bunch of them are photographers.

Some of these creatives outlets can get pretty niche. One friend was in India and, inspired by traditional wedding Baraats - the groom’s procession to the venue accompanied by his party with a brass band and drums playing Bollywood hits - he is incubating an east-meets-west inspired music video that plays off the concept. Sounds really freaking cool.

And another guy is building a homebrewed smart+connected home ecosystem. Just for kicks.

As for me… well, I’m whatever it is that’s happening to me.

It’s like some bug has caught on and it’s quietly spreading through everyone I know.

When I pointed this out, someone suggested it might just be a function of the stage of life that me and my peers are now in. That could be a factor too. But I can’t help but feel like the secular trend of AI emerging in all of our daily lives is a pretty big part of it too.

Could it be that AI is creating both the necessity as well as the pathway for us to get in touch with our creative selves?

On our growing need to be creative: yes, I will fully agree that AI is magical, wonderful, opens new doors, blah blah blah. But I will also point out that in magically accelerating our capacity to accomplish tasks AI’s also robbed us of some of the magic of figuring it out. Of doing. There is a difference between the dopamine derived from having completed a thing versus that of having actually performed it. It’s not necessarily worse, but it is different.

I love that I can now write a prompt and ten minutes later voila! my codebase has advanced. But there used to be a certain satisfaction in spending an afternoon deeply engrossed in my IDE, thinking through a feature, methodically weaving and stitching that feature throughout my codebase, groaning through the bugs on the way to getting the dang thing to compile and then finally - eventually - ah-ha… there it is. The satisfaction of I’ve made it.

Life gets boring watching someone else put together your Lego sets.

Regarding the point about AI enabling us to be creative: I’m somewhat less sure I have a grasp on the specific shape of this. I haven’t yet inquired as to the specific people I listed and deeply dug for common ground truth. But something tells me there’s something interesting going on.

Creativity doesn’t have to take the form of the serious, thematically coherent “check this out” hobbies that we want to share with others. I posit creativity can take all sorts of forms. Some of them are much lighter weight.

Every time someone uses ChatGPT to generate an anime rendering of their dog flying a plane.

When they’re idling and, on a whim during their downtime, they upload a photo of their living room and ask for suggestions how the space could feel brighter.

And even when folks in a certain mood are using certain tools to generate smut fiction starring their favorite characters.

I’d tell you that all of these examples are on some level a form of personal expression. We can argue about whether what they’ve each generated can be called art - let’s file that away as a topic for another time - but I do think they are unquestionably manifestations of creativity.

And the wonderful thing about creativity is that it has a tendency to snowball. A little creative work tends to beget a little more creative energy and on and on. The worst thing that can happen to a creative is falling into a rut.

I think small AI-assisted creative moments might be growing and nurturing that part within all of us which wants to make and to express. And I think this is contributing to my friends being more in touch with their creative selves. I think AI might be helping in other ways as well, but for now I’ll stick to the weaker form of my circumstantial assertion.

You know, in some sense, this is making me really hopeful about the future.

I’m a sucker and I’m emotional and I know that I’m liable to let both cloud my judgment. It’s true. But I simply cannot bear the “AI will take all our jobs. AI will turn us into mindless drones. We’ll be reduced to agency-devoid cows” drivel. And do not get me started on that “permanent underclass” bullshit. I’ve got a rant about that which has been slowly boiling up inside me itching to burst out for some time now. I’ll save it for another day.

And so, yes, I’m a sucker and I’m emotional. But I cannot help feeling that AI might make us much, much more creative.

Now wouldn’t it be wonderful if, at the end of it all, what AI really did was make us more human.

I’ll choose to believe in this future for now.