Does AI help or hinder creativity? Nerds and creatives sound off

Has the backlash against AI reached a fever pitch? "I really … hate generative AI," said the CEO of illustration company Procreate in a recent video posted on X. The title above the video: "We're never going there. Creativity is made not generated."

Procreate's post hit a nerve-it went viral with close to 10 million views in less than a week-though not the same nerve for everyone.

"We are going through a unique moment of automation of artistry and craftsmanship," said Volkmar Uhlig, VP of AI Infrastructure at IBM on a recent Mixture of Experts podcast episode. "But there will always be a need and demand for unique art," he said.

Many creatives are not so sure.

Resistance against AI

Thousands in the design community and artistic world more broadly were thrilled to see Procreate voice their concerns. They are worried that AI kills creativity and craftsmanship and will ultimately steal their jobs.

Procreate's comment also tapped into a larger backlash against AI. In April, Dove became the first beauty brand to ban AI-generated representations of women because it ran counter to the authenticity of their brand and potentially threatens women's well-being, Dove said.

"At Dove, we seek a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like-not algorithms," said Alessandro Manfredi, Chief Marketing Officer at Dove.

Dove conducted a study with over 33,000 women globally and found that 1 in 3 women feel pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know it's fake or AI-generated.

In certain cases, using AI can damage the relationship between a brand and its most loyal fans. In June, Toys"R"Us released a controversial ad generated by OpenAI's Sora that sparked fury. Many viewers criticized the little boy featured as "ghoulish" and "creepy."

Despite the backlash, the toy company said that this experiment was "successful," according to Toys"R"Us Studios President Kim Miller Olko in an NBC interview.

In response to the criticism of AI taking people's jobs, Olko argued that was not true in this instance. About a dozen people worked on the video, approximately the same as other videos.

"Geoffrey is an animation. He's a cartoon," Miller Olko said. "We weren't going to hire a giraffe, you know what I mean? This was an animation."

The case for AI in creativity

Meanwhile, an AI-generated Volvo ad produced by a super-fan in July received wide-scale acclaim for its creativity under time pressure. Laszlo Gaal, a Hungarian colorist with no official connection to Volvo, used Runway's text-to-video tool to create an entire Volvo commercial in just 24 hours. It went viral nearly immediately.

Certain industries are closer to unanimously enthusiastic about generative AI. Software developers and engineers, for instance, use several AI-powered tools to code more quickly, increasing productivity and reducing costs as AI takes over menial tasks.

And beyond tedious work, gen AI can help prototype much faster because the large language models can take over the refactoring and documentation of code. Then developers are freed up to spend time on only the most promising prototypes.

But who gets the final say? "You're asking a bunch of nerds about art," said Skyler Speakman, Senior Research Scientist at IBM, in the Mixture of Experts podcast, calling for the perspective of "artists and craftsmen."

Creatives, it turns out, are mixed. While the naysayer camp is strong, others also find gen AI saves a tremendous amount of time, among other benefits.

For example, in the field of content marketing, gen AI can help with tasks that involve creating summaries of the main content or that are easily derived from the main pieces, says James Pate, Global SEO Strategist at IBM.

Pate's team uses IBM watsonx to fill out metadata and tags for thousands of content pages that need to be migrated. This "helped us avoid publishing pages without descriptions or holding up the migrations," said Pate.

Gen AI may even supercharge and democratize creativity, argues Rogier Vijverberg, CEO of advertising agency SuperHeroes.

"Gen AI enables creators around the world to visualize their imaginations in a way that wasn't possible before without a large budget."

The reality is more nuanced than AI versus humans, Vijverberg adds. "There are always human creators using these tools." Vijverberg's firm recently added six "AI artists"-creators who are particularly skilled at using the latest generative AI tools.

These AI artists sit in a new division of Vijverberg's agency, a digital art collective called Jimmy, which represents the "world's best CGI and AI artists."

Even Procreate, which grabbed headlines for saying it would never use AI, made some concessions three days after their original post on X.

Responding to comments that highlighted the productivity gains from AI, Procreate wrote:

"We understand that some AI tools may help with productivity. We don't have any problems with these as long as they're doing the boring or dangerous work and the data is ethically sourced. We'll only be interested in exploring AI tools to create even better tools for artists."

Want more? A new study looks at what happens when ChatGPT is used to assist humans on a set of creative tasks.

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