The fear is that with AI use, human creativity will cease
Reading time: the best invested 14 minutes of your creative life.
Summary
Are you a church or other musician, a writer about religion and other topics, or a filmmaker? Are you worried AI will eliminate your job? Here is good news for you.
The creative world is buzzing with concerns about AI. Videos and articles shout doomsday headlines about how AI will replace us or kill us. But can AI replace us? As a writer, musician, and filmmaker, I understand the concern. I can alleviate some of these. But I also tell it like it is.
Ref. verses
“A man’s gift makes room for him And brings him before great men.”
– Proverbs 18:16 (NASB)
I also see two familiar patterns, having worked with this since the 1960s: Technology creates change, but mimicking human emotion and creativity is a stretch for AI. It’s not the huge threat to creativity it’s professed to be.
The creative markets are horribly competitive, and it’s easy to get discouraged. However, focusing on continuous learning and creative development offers a far more productive path than dwelling on perceived obstacles.
The cream rises to the top in the creative world. AI only mimics the most common content by analyzing the patterns and structures of existing music. Quality rises above all if the public deems it worthy.
Podcast show links: Substack, YouTube video, Spotify, and Apple podcasts. These appear a day after blog-article posts.
Deep Dive topics:
Change in our world is driven by technology.
Technology eliminates jobs and creates new jobs.
The differences between AI and people.
Consider past technology driven changes in the creative fields.
The history of the movie industry is a an informative tale.
Writing and communications, and technology.
Church planning season – strong impact course.
Free video preview of the course.
Building a Community of Action.
End Summary
Deep Dive – Will AI Stop Creativity?
Change in our world is driven by technology
I wrote the book, The Future of Work, Education, Economy, based on MIT and hundreds of other researchers on these subjects. Technology destroys, enhances, and creates jobs.
Technological change follows a familiar pattern. It automates processes formerly done by humans. And then it creates new jobs either from new technology, or because the need is there, or because people are endlessly creative. It always creates more jobs than it ends.
AI will enhance a lot of jobs (make them easier), like having an assistant to do things for you, like paralegals do research and give it to lawyers. It’s the same for robotics. (A lot of lawyers and paralegals will lose their jobs.)
But with every advancement in technology, despite the fears of this “ending everything,” advancements always create more jobs. Many of the jobs are within the same company. For example, Elon Musk owns technology companies and regularly lays off thousands of employees. What happens to them? Some are rehired. Most become hired by other technology companies.
The things AI offers are speed and widespread information retrieval. It has a degree of creativity, but not like humans. This gives it advantages in solving math and other problems much more quickly than people can. It speeds up medical research and can select fewer test trial subjects.
Technology eliminates jobs and creates new jobs
Before the printing press, people wrote on clay tablets or parchment. There weren’t many writers. The first renditions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, 3000 BCE, on clay tablets were simply skeletons of hero stories meant to be told verbally and embellished. As writing became more popular, religious texts were written on parchment (tree bark), and scribes copied them to circulate. It was an incredibly laborious process with very limited distribution. Not many people could read or write.
Gutenberg used technology to create the printing press in 1440, which no doubt put a lot of scribes out of business, but created endless jobs in the print industry. Suddenly knowledge could be duplicated in books and circulated to every person who could read. This was as big a step forward as the Internet.
The printing pressed ruled for six hundred years until the 20th Century. The Lumière brothers in Paris in December 1895, used technology to create movies. Ideas could be spread through movies. Movies created endless jobs.
In the 18th Century, farming was mechanized by implements that planted and harvested crops. This put a tremendous number of people out of work, but all these implements had to be manufactured, transported, sold, maintained, and repaired. Suddenly physical work stopped destroying people’s bodies, and many new jobs were created.
The US changed from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy through technological change in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the 20th Century recording technology was developed and rapidly changed from recording on vinyl to tape, to digital on MP3 on thumb drives, then MP3 streaming. Each change eliminated some jobs and created new ones.
People thought TV would kill radio. Didn’t happen. You can’t watch TV while driving or on the job, but you can listen to the radio.
In the mid-1980s, computer use became widespread, and in the 1990s Internet use became widespread. The Internet put all the world’s information at the fingertips of anyone willing to use a computer and search. Computers changed the business world from entering data on paper to entering it on the computer where it could be rapidly searched. Clerk jobs were replaced by data entry people.
AI has made Internet search much more thorough and easier compared to consulting thousands of files on a subject. It’s a huge time saver.
Despite all the technological changes, effect on employment has been positive. Today we have what is regarded as full employment. Everyone capable and willing to work has a job. Most of the jobs we have today weren’t even thought about in 1930.
The differences between AI and people
If we think AI is going to take over because AI gained artificial general intelligence (AGI) to equal humans,’ It helps to understand the differences between AI and humans.
Will AI replace people?
There are some aspects of people that AI can replicate. AI potentially can become self-aware and potentially be “conscious.” But we don’t understand what consciousness is, so it’s hard to say. I think being self-aware would be the easy part.
Can AI have agency and autonomy like humans? Only as much agency as programmers give it. Operating in the real world is difficult and requires robotics. But AI can operate in the virtual world. Sometimes the virtual world is even more important. It’s the source of many things.
AI and intelligence: AI is only as knowledgeable as we are collectively. It only knows the information we feed it. Even if it collects information autonomously, it only knows what is made available to it. This is where things start to break down. AI doesn’t create new knowledge. So it can’t be smarter than the knowledge we humans are already aware of or are being made aware of.
AI and creativity. Ai isn’t very creative. It can do things like write stories, but it does so based on stories that have already been written. It mimics what humans do. Creativity in humans comes partly from mimicking, but partly from abstract thought. AI can do a bit of abstract thought, but not in any depth.
AI and emotion: AI can analyze emotional responses, but doesn’t experience emotion. Emotion is felt-meaning, and AI has a very limited capacity for experience. Possibly AI will develop some capacity for that. But people react primarily emotionally to experience and envelop that in language to represent it. AI is always logical, but people generally react emotionally, not logically.
AI doesn’t experience the real world, doesn’t attach emotion to experiences in memories, and doesn’t create new language. Perhaps at some point, it will.
AI and meaning and purpose: Being self-aware, if AI reaches that point, doesn’t mean that AI can develop an independent sense of meaning and purpose. Meaning is a very nebulous affair that often has to do with spirituality. The purpose is derived from meaning. For AI, the purpose is something programmers give it.
So on five aspects of being human, AI doesn’t reach those heights. It only has the agency we give it, only has the knowledge we give it, and can’t create new knowledge in the real world. It doesn’t have the capacity for felt meaning or emotion so has limited capacity for understanding and creating emotion, and it isn’t able to be very creative because it lacks the capacity for abstract thought.
Consider Past Technology-Driven Changes in the Creative Fields
Things are endlessly changing in the creative fields of music, novels, and movies. Every new advance is heralded as a killer of some cherished part of the field. Yet what really happens is new things find a place in the market. TV didn’t eliminate radio. Big screen TVs and streaming haven’t eliminated movie theaters, although nearly all drive-in theaters left. Theaters found a place in the movie release window that creates huge profits.
The film industry history offers a telling tale of technological change.
The history of the movie industry is a an informative tale
Major studios have always ruled the industry. Thomas Edison’s company made cameras and owned several movie studios in the United States. His company patented the loop on projectors that prevented jams. I’ve used them.
Edison systematically shut down, sometimes by going in and smashing the cameras, theaters that used the loop on competitors’ projectors. It was an unfair situation. Cameras that used th loop to synchronize sound with the image won’t sync the audio with lip movement properly on projectors without the loop. Theaters had to use the loop.
Studios controlled the market. Many movie studios had exclusive contracts with actors, owned the movies, and the theaters. The monopoly created unfair marketplaces and they were made to split up.
Many artists who couldn’t crack the studio monopoly created studios of their own. For example, in silent film, in 1919 by Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith started United Artists. With industry changes, by the late 1940s, United Artists had virtually ceased to exist. It’s difficult to keep up.
Filmmaker George Lucas in 1971, started Lucas Film. It made the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Eventually, Lucas Film was acquired by Disney.
DreamWorks Pictures was started by Steven Spielberg and others in 1994. DreamWorks evolved through several “ownership” deals with other major studios and now distributes movies through Universal Studios.
Independent film can do well, but eventually, everything goes to the big guys or independents work with them.
Filmmakers started using Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) in the late 1950s, and it really took off in the mid-1980s as computer technology improved. Advances today include 3D images with computer-generated characters, such as in the fully animated movies Toy Story and Avatar.
CGI brings previously unimaginable ideas and concepts to life, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on screen. It creates fantastical and immersive environments, from alien planets to magical realms, that would be impossible or impractical to build physically.
It’s used extensively for visual effects, creating everything from explosions and natural phenomena to subtle enhancements that improve the overall look and feel of a film. Things that are impossible or very unsafe can be done by CGI.
CGI is very expensive to do since it is so time-intensive for artists. It runs in the realm of $15,000-70,000 per shot, with a minute running one to three million. People prefer the 3D images created by AI to the 2D created by Disney and other animators. While many decry the loss of animators, this has created a lot of jobs.
AI is now beginning to improve and automate some of these processes so they are available for more movies at minimal costs for independents. Entire movies can be created by independents at a fraction of the cost. So the new jobs are in AI.
The history of movies is one of continuous technological change that has opened new vistas and created new jobs.
Music
The Evolution of music has steadily become more electronic
The evolution of electronic music includes: electric guitar, tremolo and echo, sampling, drum machines, midi music auto-generation, studio musicians, techno (favored in Europe), autotune for voices, and AI-generated.
While many artists fear being displaced by AI, the reality is some are made targets for AI because of their lack of variety and creativity. AI is wonderful at repeating things people do, and this is what many artists are already doing, repeating.
The music from the 1940s through the mid-1990s was wonderfully creative. It had a lot of variety. Numerous genres were created over the decades, different sounds were introduced, and people heard huge variety. Yet most popular music focuses on just a few basic chord progressions using C, F, G, D, A minor … with endless variety in rhythm, beat, distortion, electronic modification, and different sounding instruments.
The democratization of music
The music industry has always presented a false persona of entry through talent. Some music charted and you wonder how in the world such low quality got selected. Sing “na na na” and you hit the charts. This isn’t to deny that many artists have amazing talent and deserve to be there. Even some “na na na” was really good. In the 1960s through 1980s bands had enormous creativity in music. Fewer seem to today. There’s a reason for that, and it’s listener preference and industry choices.
Record distributors, with their enormous wealth producing machinery, created the market for music by distributing 45 RPM records for free to radio stations. I played those on the air, and did the first rock on roll show ever on WTAY in the early 1960s. I tried to replicate WLS and KXOK, but toned down a little.
Recording studios and distributors found the artists they felt had talent, were marketable, and they could promote. They had their fingers on the pulse of public taste through things like Billboard charts and record sales figures. They did the promotion, mostly by sending free records to radio stations to play. People heard the music and bought it.
They were the gatekeepers who essentially controlled the market. Without them you could have a band that played local venues, but you couldn’t get into the big money hit market. They worked with artists, sometimes recording records over several years with different managers until the song finally got good enough to market.
Artists today want to be original enough for the market with the help of studio musicians, studio backing, and working the song over several years. Studio productions aren’t originality.
It all changes but stays the same. Even with the democratization of music, the major players in music, movies, and publishing, remain the major avenue to success. They have the connections and power to make it happen.
How the Music Industry Works in 10 Key Parts. https://soundcharts.com/blog/mechanics-of-the-music-industry
Things began to change in the 1990s. Music studios sapped the artists’ earnings through exorbitant fees, sending many of them into bankruptcy. The Messed Up Truth About The 1990s Music Industry.
Programming managers for large radio conglomerates, in cahoots with the stations, decided on what music to play on all their stations. How Corruption and Greed Led to the Downfall of Rock Music.
What’s missing in the discussion is that only a few stations catered to a rock and roll audience, and they tended to play classic rock. A huge segment of listeners of daytime FM radio are women in offices or at home. A station playing Top 40 pop would likely have a larger female audience than a station playing classic rock. I’m not putting the blame on women, it’s just the reality of the market.
While not contiguous in genre across the US, the big owners, iHeartMedia, Audacy, Cumulus Media, Hubbard Radio, and Beasley Media Group, play different genres in different markets.
If you listen to the top hits today, they are mostly in the easy-listening pop genre, placed there by audience preference and programming managers. They mostly sound the same. There are a few good hits by some amazing artists. But if you want variety, you go to other music venues or listen to your favorite artists on something like YouTube.
I personally am a high-energy person and I prefer to listen to rock and roll with a fast beat (not metal). The rapid beat keeps me energized and productive. Easy listening puts me to sleep. So I’m sad at the loss of this genre which has faded since the mid-1990s. What AI cannot do in music?
Ultimately, music is a human endeavor. It’s a way for us to express our emotions, connect with others, and make sense of the world around us. While AI can be a powerful tool, it can’t replace the human element that makes music so meaningful.
What AI Can Do in Music?
Since AI only mimics what has already been done, it’s more likely that AI will become a tool that enhances and augments musicians, rather than replacing them. Musicians can use AI to:
- Explore new creative possibilities: AI can help musicians experiment with different sounds and styles, pushing the boundaries of their creativity.
- Increase productivity: AI can automate tedious tasks, freeing up musicians to focus on the more creative aspects of their work.
- Reach a wider audience: AI can help musicians personalize their music and reach new listeners through targeted recommendations.
The human element:
Ultimately, music is a human endeavor. It’s a way for us to express our emotions, connect with others, and make sense of the world around us. While AI can be a powerful tool, it can’t replace the human element that makes music so meaningful.
Writing, communications, and technology
My primary field is communications. Mostly writing anymore. I’ve been publishing online since 1996. Nonfiction, fiction, and courses. What I’ve seen is people all over the world take what I write and republish it as their own. Some have even taken credit for my books. LOL! They get found and stopped.
It’s easy to take stuff. You can use AI to rewrite articles and do a good job. It looks like people in other countries, may republish my entire websites as their own in a different language. My websites literally have thousands of original, groundbreaking articles, that took thousands of hours to research and write.
Many people have no respect for others time and abilities. If they have access to it, they take it. I put the percentage of people who will steal regularly at ten percent, and another ten percent will do it when pushed. Others put the percentage much higher. Corruption is very high in some countries so stealing is rampant.
Original, well researched articles are in high demand. Mine are original and well researched. I suspect as soon as mine is published, it’s scraped on the Web, rewritten with AI, and republished many times. The AI tools for doing this are widely available.
My choice is to not publish, or publish and accept what’s happening. Things change.
People compete with me through AI. It can write respected articles on any subject and people can get paid money for it through advertising. Some even create different versions of my article, combine it with other articles, and publish it on different sites.
Writing novels and screenplays has followed a similar development to music, starting with storytelling around campfires and in King’s courts, with our first recorded story of the Epic of Gilgamesh around 2100 BCE on clay tablets. Stage plays followed, and stories were written later on parchment. The printing press made
AI can write novels and screenplays. But there are websites where anyone can write a novel (usually romances) and any teenager or retired person can do it, and maybe earn a few dollars. Much of it is just as redundant as something AI produces. Romance novels, which are always in demand, are hopelessly redundant: Young woman meets rich guy, they fall in love, then something happens to ruin it for them, they conquer whatever the obstacle is and get married. Much of science fiction is the same. Much of the TV criminal justice series are the same.
People like stories that are the same, but slightly different. The girl always gets the guy, the humans always win against bad aliens, and the bad guy always gets outsmarted and caught. It’s life-affirming. The challenge is for the writer in mass fiction, with its minimal literary depth and character development, is to change all the details so it seems unique.
To get noticed you need originality. It has to be unique. This is what separates the good writer from the excellent, besides people behind you and marketing.
Can you crack the market?
Regardless of how you create music, or how you write novels and movies, can you get to the big time? AI is not the bogeyman it’s purported to be. There is nothing like original, unique productions. Quality and uniqueness are market sellers that upstage the mundane.
The difficulty for creatives is being found, being marketable, and being the best. Are you better than the 120,000 other songs uploaded daily? Or the 60,000 screenplays the WGA registers yearly? Or the four million new books published each year, eleven thousand each day?
Who can find you? Do you stand out? If they can’t find you, then you don’t exist and are relegated to the pile of statistics.
Here’s a sad example: You would think that the international exposure and training by stars given to new artists on TV programs like The Voice would be sufficient promotion to send a career into orbit. But only a few of these artists go on to have big careers in music. I believe far more deserve it than actually make it.
I like seeing artists develop on The Voice, and the famous artists do a great job of coaching their choices to higher talent levels. But pop music was never about the voice. Many singers with very mediocre voices became pop stars in the 1980s. The talent was in their creativity. For example, Bob Dylan was never considered to have a good voice but sold well and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
In some ways the old ways of promoting music is ending. It used to be that recording artists had to travel and do concerts. But the heyday of artists filling stadiums seems to be over, with the notable exception of Taylor Swift.
Major artists have recently been cancelling tours for a variety of reasons. Ticket prices are unaffordable, especially after the Great Recession, the pandemic, and high inflation. Ticket prices in Europe are much lower, which raises the question of why US ticket prices are so high.
Pearl Jam blames concert fame lagging on people “grazing,” which means they listen to a large number of artists and often don’t listen all the way through. This fits with the tendency of new generations, faced with a limitless supply of engaging material, endlessly flitting from one entertaining piece of content to another for maximum entertainment. The End of Big Stadium Rockers? I don’t know if flitting is doing it, or just the staggering number of artists making songs and putting them on online music services today.
Many artists are opting for more intimate venues, like Radio City Music Hall or the Beacon Theatre, going back to their roots in playing clubs and small venues.
The real keys are excellence, marketability, and discovery. AI just repeats the style of music already existing. It rarely creates something totally unique and stands out. It’s no different from a lot of already existing music on the market that is bland. There is a market for repeat bland stuff if you’re already a huge star, but not for unknowns.
These are the keys:
Excellence: Be better than most of the music, novels, and movies already on the market so that people want to hear you.
Marketability: You can make all the music, novels, and movies you want that you want to listen to or read, and you will be the only person enjoying it. Learn what others like, and live in that genre.
Discoverable: You can begin to be discovered by getting on playlists in various venues. To get on a YouTube playlist, visit this link: How to get your song on YouTube Music Playlists. For Spotify, Turn up your music. Build lifelong fans. Being on a playlist makes you discoverable, but only if you have talent and develop a fan base.
Another aspect of being discoverable is to have connections who will promote you. Few have this without a contract with recording companies, or an agent for your books or movies. Studios and publishers already have enough artists, so you have to displace another project.
Building a fan base, and adding original music or stories often, is the way to continue to build your career in music or writing. It costs a lot more to get new fans than to publish to existing ones. If you can, find incentives to get your fans to add fans, such as access to exclusive content if they bring new fans.
Advertise for free if you can. Paid advertising on Google is horribly expensive because you’re competing for clicks with wealthy major companies. But it is a way to be found. Click rates are usually below five percent, and purchase rates (if purchasing), are generally below ten percent of the clicks. Pay per click is usually over 25 cents. Do the math. Facebook and Instagram ads are less expensive but with the same click and purchase rates.
The Pain and the Reward
I understand the pain of creatives who want their work to be recognized and to sell, and would love to have a career in music. The creative world is highly competitive. Breaking in is a huge mountain to climb. If you have the will, are persistent, and do the right things it can happen.
Ultimately, AI is a tool. It can enhance our creative abilities, automate mundane tasks, and open new avenues for expression. But it can’t replicate the human element – the creativity, the emotion, the unique perspective–that lies at the heart of all art.
Yes, there will be job shifts. Some redundant work will be replaced. But new opportunities will emerge, requiring new skills and new approaches. We must embrace these changes, not fear them. The creative world has always been competitive, and AI is simply the latest challenge. But the cream always rises to the top.
Conclusion
Technological change is endless. As evolution teaches us, the adaptable are the ones that survive.
The key is to focus on what AI cannot do: mimic genuine human emotion. Create original, compelling work that resonates with audiences on a deeper level. Use AI as a helper, not a replacement, and you’ll have a chance in the evolving creative landscape. Remember, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Human emotion is still king.
Good luck!
“Outrage (righteous wrath) can be good if it compels us to positive action but not to hate.” – Dorian Scott Cole
“With hate, we have more to lose than gain – break the cycle” – Dorian Scott Cole
Probability Space
What probability spaces can we open in our minds to focus on becoming the best?
(A probability space is where all of the elements necessary for something to happen are present and it’s almost inevitable. All it takes is intention.)
Potential Space
If you think creatively and allow your mind to wander and explore, how can we explore and understand the depth of human emotion that we write and sing about?
(A potential space is a virtual space in our minds where entirely new things can take shape.) More: Is Music A Form Of Prayer?
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. This helps me improve my work.
Please subscribe to my Patheos Newsletter.
Below is information for church planning to minister to new generations, building a community of action, service opportunities, Education Opportunities for new generations, and descriptions of the author’s books.
Church Planning Season – Strong Impact Course
How can churches minister to new generations if they won’t come to church? The church has been losing people at 1% a year, and now most of new generations won’t come.
I developed and presented a course on understanding and working with new generations. I would like to say I had rave reviews, but on a scale of 1 to 5 it averaged 4.5. Well, some people were raving.
The course helps people understand new generations, their values, and their differences. It helps people understand how to build a bridge to them and minister to them. The old worn-out things we used to do don’t work, and for good reason. This solutions-focused course enables people to find new ways, appropriate ways, to minister to these generations in their local circumstances. It’s for church groups and generates deep discussion.
Free Video Preview of the Course
Course on Udemy: Understanding and Working with New Generations
– Dorian
Our answer is God. God’s answer is us. Together we make the world better.
Restore and recreate. Take time to celebrate life. Laugh, sing, and dance regularly, even every day. Happy. This is why we dance to celebrate life: Reindeer actually running and dancing.
Building a Community of Action
New Way Forward Community
Can we make a positive change in our world and end a lot of suffering?
Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf, said: “Although the world is full of suffering, it’s also full of the overcoming of it.”
The human spirit yearns for a world without suffering, but it’s through facing challenges that we progress. The world isn’t perfect, but together we can create a future with less hardship. Famine, discrimination, gun violence, and injurious economic and educational disparities are complex problems, yet understanding their root causes empowers us to find solutions.
Launching in first quarter 2025, the New Way Forward community will connect individuals seeking practical solutions and creating lasting change. We’ll focus on understanding problems and their solutions, and how to effectively create change.
Join us in building a brighter tomorrow! New Way Forward on Facebook.
Civic Service Opportunities
Do Unto Others Kindness Campaign, and civic engagement.
United Methodist Church Volunteer Opportunities.
Join or support Zero Hour and amplify the voices of youth organizing for climate action.
Peoples Hub. Resistance, Resilience, Restoration, Re-imagination. Online Popular Education. For movement workers to learn, connect, collaborate, and strategize – in and across the disability justice and solidarity economy movements.
Stakeholder Capitalism – a video podcast series from the World Economic Forum. Can capitalism be made to work for all of us – and to improve rather than destroy the state of the planet?
General service and aid opportunities (on One Spirit Resources Website). To add your service opportunity to the One Spirit Resources list, contact the author (me) through Facebook Messenger. Note that I only friend people I know.
————————————–
Education Opportunities for New Generations
Becoming an Entrepreneur – MITx online
Evaluating Social Programs – MITx online
_______________________
Bible scripture verses are New American Standard Version (NASB), unless noted.
_______________________
Author and Books
Appease the Volcano: What does God require from people? The voices of the ancients from many religions echo much of the same things: It starts with law, then mercy and forgiveness, then love. Love is a major emphasis in all major religions and replaces law.
The Prophetic Pattern: Ancient and Modern Prophecy: How to distinguish the intent of various types of prophecies and oracles, both ancient and modern.
Preparing For the Future Of Work and Education: Analysis of the kinds of jobs that AI and Robotics will displace, and the educational requirements for them. AI will replace or augment thirty percent of jobs. This is an in-depth analysis citing many authoritative sources.
Author Website: Dorian Scott Cole
