How AI helps us reclaim human creativity
If you’re worried that AI is going to be the death of human creativity, there is something you can do about it: Go make something.
Make a bookcase. Make a sweater. Make a song.
Write a story, a poem, a program, or a text.
Sit down at a piano and muddle your way through a tune. Code a script that makes your computer display a whimsical message. Take an old balloon and a stack of newspaper and some glue and make a lumpy papier maché bowl.
Make your own teeny tiny dystopian movie musical.
Making things is an essential, joyful, messy human experience. So when we see technology making things we thought only people could make—images, stories, songs, code, even physical objects—it’s unnerving.
It’s especially unnerving for anyone who earns a living by making things that AIs can now make, or whose past work was used (as some of mine has), unlicensed, as “training data” for AI to remix. That’s the original sin of generative AI: plundering online archives, and then using all that harvested material to power turnkey creativity.
The latest episode of Me + Viv is out today, and it’s all about what it means when AI starts making things. This episode of Me + Viv is my own personal favorite thing I’ve ever made, and I’ve made a lot of stuff: Books and websites, sweaters and tables, piñatas and apps and princess costumes and data visualizations. It is definitely the most fun I have ever had making anything, and it may be the most fun I have ever had doing anything, period.
No wonder we are afraid of AI taking that joy, and also, that agony. Because the joy and satisfaction of making things is inextricable from the effort of the making them. You can enjoy reading a novel that someone wrote in a summer just as much as one that took the author a decade, but from a maker’s perspective, the sweat that goes into a creative endeavor is part of what drives the sense of accomplishment.
To quote one of my favorite songs about creativity, from one of my favorite shows:
There are some people in the world who say that writing stories
Or composing music or dancing sparkly dances is easy for them
Nothing interferes with their ability to create
While I celebrate their creative freedom
A little part of me just wants to punch those motherfuckers in the teeth.
When making things is hard—when it takes time and self-doubt and maybe tearing back a week’s worth of knitting because you read the pattern wrong—it makes you appreciate all the other made things.
We live in a world where, by any historical standard, stuff is cheap: You can get free books delivered to your phone from the library, download free software to your computer, listen to any music from anywhere anytime. If you leave your hat on the bus, Amazon will deliver a new one the next day, and if you need a chair, you can find someone else’s discarded chair on Facebook marketplace for a few bucks, or for free.
Intangible stuff is so abundant that we are mostly overwhelmed by the effort of keeping up with all the stuff we’re supposed to read and watch and listen to. Physical stuff is so cheap that one of the biggest logistical challenges of modern life is figuring out where to put all the stuff in your home, or how to get all the extra stuff out of it.
Making things yourself is the antidote to that abundance. When you have built the bench for your front porch, you have fresh eyes for the wonder of a public park full of benches that someone far away assembled from parts that somebody else machined, and then put in a shipping container that someone else brought across the ocean. When you have spent a year writing a book, you crack the spine on another author’s novel like you’re unwrapping a Faberge egg. When you have painstakingly lined up the shot-to-shot transitions in a two-minute video, it changes how you watch the next Hollywood blockbuster.
Our anxiety about AI-enabled creativity comes in part from a fear that AI is stealing the satisfaction of creative effort. That’s why you see posts like:
But these posts are based on a radical misunderstanding of AI, and also, of creativity.
Making things doesn’t have to be hard to be worthwhile, and also, AI doesn’t necessarily make it easy. AI doesn’t hang out in the cloud, making art, while humans labor in meatspace doing all the chores. Seeing a “made with AI” label on a photo or song tells you very little about how much human care or creativity went into the outcome.
It’s time to paint the humans back into the picture; to acknowledge that when we’re talking about AI art, we’re mostly talking about something a human made with AI. The way I make an image with AI is really different from the way a photographer or painter creates something, and the way I make a song is really different from how it looks for a human singer-songwriter. But most of the AI-generated songs in Me+Viv reflect dozens of hours of work: Riffing with AI for the spark of an idea, writing my own lyrics with AI as a fancy thesaurus, iteratively tweaking musical prompts and lyrics until I have words and music that work together, and sometimes, remixing the AI-generated song, virtual instrument by virtual instrument.
AI makes the making easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, and it takes a whole new set of skills to wield these new creative tools; skills we are only starting to learn.
What easier means, for many of us, is simply possible. AI is the on ramp to all the things you think you’re not good enough or skilled enough to make.AI is the ultimate retort to the voices saying, You’re not an artist.You’re too clumsy to make your own furniture. Your voice isn’t good enough.
Seriously, fuck those messages. If you can think it, you can make it.
Making with AI — as opposed to by AI — takes the narrow doorway to the experience of creativity, and blasts it wide open. Now it’s our job to walk through, and reclaim the creative energy that belongs to each of us, before we got all those messages about can and not good enough.
So open that doorway for yourself, and go make something, like I did with Me + Viv.
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