In this article, “AI creative work” stands for AI-generated art, writing, music, poetry, and any other form of creative work that an AI machine could generate based on a given prompt.

I have been trying to avoid getting caught up in trends to keep the blog articles more sustainable for art amateurs. However, I keep hearing about AI art and how it will put an end to many careers, including those of artists. 

Why are artists concerned with AI’s creative work?

If you ask me, artists are not the only ones… I’ve seen copywriters, managers, designers, and many other professionals argue that AI is a threat. We have seen many jobs disappear in the last couple of decades as technology reached a far higher level than we expected it to.

So the power of AI is instilling fear in humans and making us question where the world is going and who will dominate in the future. It’s an AI vs. Humans kind of equation.

What do I personally think of AI creative work?

To answer this question, I tested different AI prompts. I did this so I could compare the process and outcome of my work with those generated by AI.

ChatGPT writing a blog post using the words “AI” and “Creativity”

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post about AI and creativity, and this was the answer:

Me writing a blog post about “AI” and “Creativity”

I had the idea to write this article after seeing people talk about it online. So as a starting point, both ChatGPT and I, based our writing on already existing data. 

ChatGPT took the text prompts I typed in, did the search, and generated a blog post of 234 words in 2 seconds. The article generated is grammatically correct—not very neutral, but pretty convincing, I would say.

I also noticed that ChatGPT went on about a potential danger of AI replacing human creativity, which I didn’t mention in the given prompt. That made me question the originality of the article generated by ChatGPT and the sense of defensiveness in the language used. 

Is AI generated creative work meant to initiate the dialogue around how AI could possibly replace humans?

When I started typing this article, my mind had to draw a roadmap to approach this topic. Thinking about “AI” and “creativity” prompts me to ask additional questions, the main one of which is the title of this article: Is AI’s creative work cultivating creativity or laziness?

So the potential danger I thought of wasn’t really about AI replacing humans. I have a wider knowledge of how limited algorithms are compared to what we humans fuel them with. Furthermore, AI in its true sense is simply the massive amount of data we have accumulated over the years, combined to create new concepts and generate faster results. In essence, a replica of human intelligence, but far less powerful! 

Am I concerned about AI replacing Humans?

My real concern in this situation is that the majority of humans are led by the “few” people working behind these AI machines. They think for us and create shortcuts to make our lives easier, which leads to laziness and might send our human ability to get creative going down the drain, in my own personal opinion.

My POV here is driven by the fear of humans collaborating with AI rather than being replaced by it.

From the ideas I had in mind, I could write a blog post that would still need to be edited a couple of times before publishing. The article took me a total of 6 hours to type and edit. And I tried to cover the topic from different perspectives to avoid programming the minds of my readers. Whether you hate or love the concept of AI-generated creative work, your opinion should be based on research, not on adopting someone else’s vision.

How would Dall-E turn the painting idea I have into an image?

In the process, I also create art. Thus, I checked Dall-E, which is one of the most popular platforms for AI-generated art based on text prompts. Dall-E basically turns words into art. 

This is the exact same method I personally use to make my artwork, and I assume many artists do.

In 2022, I made a painting that I named “The Girl with the Crypto Earring”. It is a visual mix of my love for the Dutch Golden Age Art and the little trends going on. I could describe this painting in a text prompt as: “a golden age painting with a trendy/futuristic element”.

Giving Dall-E the text prompt “a golden age painting with a trendy/futuristic touch“, generates these images.

This first selection of suggestions didn’t really give me what I was looking for, so I edited the prompt again.

Again, I wasn’t really satisfied, so I gave Dall-E a more precise prompt where I mentioned “Bitcoin”.

It finally rendered these images, which I can say does a decent job for me! Especially the third one. 

I feel like the AI emphasized the word “Golden” more than any other part of the prompt. And it took it as a color instead of a metaphoric expression as in the “Golden Age”.

An honest opinion of how Dall-E did is that it’s a 5 out of 10 kind of thing. It didn’t impress me much (although it comes with a “surprise me” option where premade images that exactly match the text prompts already programmed in are shown), but that’s still not a surprise to me.

Personal POV

My POV as an artist is that a healthy art-making process is this: What’s wrong with your Art making? The two stages nobody told you about I would rather have the closed mode of the creation process automated than the open mode. That, of course, may be perceived differently by different people. 

As an artist who works with an AI, I would need to generate more ideas to create something unique. That cuts my process of creation in half, meaning I would only work in a closed mode instead of following the natural process (starting in an open mode and then moving to the closed one). This, however, isn’t something I would personally encourage artists to follow. 

Is AI Creative work cultivating creativity or laziness?

Creativity and laziness are two concepts linked in a weird way. Sometimes, being lazy inspires creativity, as we humans would spend years figuring out a concept that could make our minute-taking tasks take seconds. And that is the main reason why humans created AI! To do our jobs for us, to save time for us, and to overall make our lives easier…

Is that really giving a sense of life, or is it stripping it of its real meaning, fun, and interesting concepts?

I mean no harm, but if you don’t have aspirations in life and would rather have a ton of leisure and free time, having AI as a part or tool to do your job with you is probably awesome.

To answer the main question of my article, I say that AI creative work is cultivating laziness more than creativity. But what do you think? 

Finally, if this is a concern of yours, I believe AI creative work will NOT replace us. A person who knows how to use AI and programs their thoughts and visions to be spread through AI will replace us.