As artificial intelligence tools push their ways into more aspects of our lives, a question looms for those in creative fields: Will AI enhance the value of our imaginations or will it extinguish creative fields as AI churns out everything from novels to movies to interior designs more cheaply and quickly than humans can?
It’s a question you’ve probably been pondering. I know I have.
Lilly Berelovich, co-founder of New York-based trend forecasting and consumer insights firm FS, is among many coming down on the optimistic side. I’m more pessimistic.
“What if AI exists specifically to unleash the full spectrum of our imagination? Not to replace us, but to remind us how infinite we really are,” Berelovich said recently during a webinar, “The Creatorship Era: Human Inspiration Meets AI Precision.” “What if this technology is here to return us to our creative essence, to make space for curiosity, emotion and the magic that only humans can feel?”
I’ll note that FS now has a vested interest in promoting AI. As part of the seminar, the company launched Muse, an AI agent integrated into its digital platform. The company describes Muse as being built to “empower creators at every stage — from research and ideation to validation and activation” and promises that Muse “anticipates users’ needs and adapts intelligently as they engage.”
Berelovich and her team acknowledge that AI is already having negative impacts across creative fields, including the loss of jobs.
“I think one of the biggest concerns for the creative industries is that using AI to solve creative problems could lead to skill atrophy, which is effectively the loss of these skills that we have spent centuries as humans perfecting because we simply won’t have to use them anymore. And there’s also this very real, very current concern that if AI replaces creative roles, then human creativity will become far less commercial, which means reduced pay for human creatives and far less investment in what are already the underfunded arts,” said Emma Grace Bailey, director of sustainability for FS, who helped present the seminar.
But Berelovich and her team argued that creative professionals, including product designers and interior designers, have been stuck in a deepening creative rut in recent decades, iterating off the ideas of others to stay commercially safe.
“Long before AI came along, creativity got stuck on this repeater,” Bailey said. “It already started to flatten. … We’ve really optimized and systemized and templated our way into sameness, and efficiency has replaced imagination. … Our creative process has become a production line.”
The result has been a blurry sameness among brands. Bailey has a point. I recently bought a small SUV and was struck by the similarities of the vehicles I considered: similar body styles, similar paint colors, similar features, similar reliability ratings. It made my decision easy: I bought my vehicle based solely on price because there was so little else to distinguish the four models I test drove. Several months after purchasing my SUV, I still have a hard time finding it in a parking lot. From the outside, it could be any Honda, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda or BMW.
Algorithms for social media, shopping sites and search engines are exacerbating the problem of “flattened” creativity “pushing us to create faster and to dilute our ideas more than ever before, really churning, constantly churning, to meet that algorithmic speed,” Bailey said.
AI fits neatly into this model of super-fast, idea generation. “But AI outputs simply aren’t ideas, and its efficiency can’t be mistaken for imagination,” Bailey said. “If we treat AI’s results as finished work, we risk accelerating sameness at an industrial scale and numbing all of us, the very people who are responsible for shaping culture.”
Harnessing AI
Instead, the FS team argued that professionals in creative fields should harness AI to usher in a new age of human creativity.
“This is a call to action,” Bailey said. “Because if creativity is to thrive in the AI era, we have to step into ‘creatorship.’ … The future of creativity will not be decided by algorithms. It will be decided by the humans who still care enough to imagine.”
A human-driven creative process that harnesses AI involves ideating and refining, validating and then refining again before taking action, Bailey said. One practical way designers and others can use AI is to automate tasks like recognizing patterns, analyzing data and scaling projects, things humans are slower to do. That can free people to tap their own curiosity, intuition and other fundamental aspects of creativity.
The goal, Bailey said, is to combine the human advantage of instinct and perspective to generate original ideas and then use AI to take “your spark and expand it.”
“One idea becomes many — stretched, reshaped and reframed from new angles,” she said. “… The result isn’t one safe idea but many bold paths that are faster, sharper and more resonate than either (human or AI) could achieve alone.”
The FS team pointed to several examples of AI at work today, including beauty brand L’Oreal using AI to develop new product formulations that use sustainable raw materials and iconic apparel brand Norma Kamali (of “Sleeping Bag” coat fame) training AI on its product archive to help the company’s designers continue the brand’s aesthetic for years to come. Puma is using AI similarly, Bailey told those attending the seminar. The sneaker and athletic wear brand fed its archive into an AI tool, which then helped its designers create a new sneaker with updated features that is still grounded in the company’s heritage.
Ania Sommerauer, vice president of content strategy for FS, offered other examples. For instance, she said, performance marketing and data firm Kinesso has built “digital audience AI agents,” trained on survey and consumer feedback to provide assessments of marketing campaigns from the perspective of a client brand’s customers. Beauty brand Estee Lauder has fed 80 years of data into an AI agent it has created to help validate future product development, marketing campaigns and business strategies. Apparel brand Levi’s uses AI-generated models to reduce the need for multiple sample sizes, reducing fabric waste.
Downsides are hard to ignore
Those all sound like cool uses for AI but I’m not convinced any of them are uplifting human creativity — or protecting the jobs of creative teams at those companies.
Let’s face it, commercial interest in AI is driven largely by businesses hoping to boost productivity and drives sales with less expense — and people are a big expense.
And it seems to me that FS’s argument that algorithms are hampering our creativity, but that AI will somehow mitigate the problem falls apart quickly: Won’t algorithms become even stronger and more insidious in an AI-driven world?
I worry, too, that the ease of using AI to write our thoughts and generate our designs will be too tempting to many of us and we’ll choose to outsource our own creativity in the interest of saving time, though it’s unclear what we’re saving time for, to spend more time staring at our screens?
Journalist and author George Packer shared similar concerns when talking about his new novel, “The Emergency,” on a recent episode of “The Bulwark” podcast.
“AI terrifies me because … social media was a nice-looking thing that turned out to be a weapon of mass destruction for the brains of a whole generation. What is AI? (It’s) 100 times that,” Packer said. “We seem ready to turn over everything to the computer, whether it’s our spiritual life, our sex life, our politics, our friendships.” (He could have easily added “our creativity” to that list.)
“(AI) seems like a perfect vehicle for us to stop having to carry the burden of being human,” Packer concluded.
I do think there are some reasons for hope. Just as many are turning away from social media, I wonder if people will rebel against AI-generated slop, craving real, human-created work instead. But even then, I fear it will be a niche interest, like the small percentage of Gen Z ditching smartphones for “dumb” versions or millennial music fans combing vintage shops for vinyl records.
Interior designers, specifically, may benefit more from AI than be harmed by it because much of their work is based on building trust and deep relationships with their clients. Interior design is not just about delivering an amazing rendering: It’s getting to know clients intimately and translating their hopes and needs into a real home.
What do you think? Is AI going to usher in a period of renewed creativity or will people in creative fields be sidelined by the machines?
