Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
For those of you wringing your hands over DALL-E-2, MidJourney, and the new wave of art-generating AI tools: stop wondering. Yes, creative jobs will be eliminated by artificial intelligence. How do we know this? Because it’s already happening, and it started a few years ago. And if we broaden the effect to technology in general (i.e. the personal computer revolution), it’s been happening for almost 40 years.
Anyone remember typesetting? Google it. As late as the 1980’s, it was an honored and important craft, performed by elite, skilled artisans employed by specialized firms known as type houses. Commercial Art Directors and Designers could scarcely function without them. But when PC’s became a thing, Art Directors were empowered to set type with the click of a mouse. The typesetting industry was wiped off the map within a couple of years. A bunch of jobs, hard-won skill, and accumulated wealth just went up in smoke. Having said that, there is reason to be hopeful. I’ll get to that later on.
The “Bad” News
AI is not “coming” to the world of commercial art. It’s here already. The latest wave of online AI-based art-generating applications gets the most attention, but AI is already well entrenched on the critical path of creative work flows. Here are 5 ways in which algorithms are supplanting skilled human effort, even as I write this.
1. Photo editing & retouching – AI has learned to recognize the content of an image. It can spot the subject of a photo, and figure out what area of a photo is the sky, for example. For a portrait, it knows how to find the subject’s face, and separately identify their eyes, nose and mouth. It has become very easy to perform edits that, only a couple of years ago, would require specialized retouchers who had the skill, the eye, and the steady hand to painstakingly make selections for targeted adjustments. The current state of AI won’t make a bad photo into a good one, but it will make your post-processing workflow less time-consuming, so the total hours will decrease along with the need to collaborate with photo retouchers.
2. Concept art – creative projects in the commercial world have to be “pitched” to get buy-in from those footing the bill. That is usually the client (yes, think of a Madmen client meeting). Concept art is unfinished, roughly rendered art that conveys an idea in a way which helps people visualize the finished work. It’s a tough needle to thread creatively: it has to be true to the concept, but clearly unfinished. Finding a good concept artist to create multiple concepts can be expensive and time consuming. But not anymore. With AI-generated art, you can produce concepts quickly and easily, at little to no cost.
3. Graphic Design – in the explosion of online graphic design tools such as Figma and Canva, we’ve seen the democratization of design, where the creative process is fast-tracked with a dizzying array of pre-fab templates for just about anything, such as flyers, postcards, social posts, and much more. But Canva has now baked in a beta version of an AI-powered text-to-imaging feature (much like DALL-E-2) to generate key images upon which designs can be based. Need a portrait of a heroic-looking man? Canva will create it for you. And you can get right to work adding additional graphics and type to your design. And when it’s done, you own all the rights to it. Where you might have had a collaboration between a designer and an illustrator or photographer, you now have a designer working solo, and working faster.
4. Copywriting – there are many AI copywriting tools in the marketplace already. AI is not yet in wide use for high-stakes copywriting where maintaining a well-curated brand image is critical. But for writing copy that conforms to a given length, structural narrative, and format, software-generated copy is already very much a thing. The results of a high school football game, for instance, can be written by AI which uses the game stats to derive structured narratives, such as a lopsided blowout or a last-minute score to win a game. A massive amount of venture capital is earmarked to improve and refine these AI-powered copywriting tools, so expect an ever-growing percentage of writing to be done by computers going forward.
5. Music Production – there are now AI tools, such as Amper Music, in wide use creating original music for media content (e.g. soundtracks). You can specify the style, mood, and length of your track, among other parameters, and the AI will generate it for you in seconds. Creating music as a backing for some other media form, such as a film or a video ad, has long been the “utilitarian” side of music production. But it has been historically performed by actual human musicians. That appears to be going away. From the standpoint of cost, man-hours, usage rights, and a host of other considerations, its rapidly becoming a no-brainer to generate original music via AI. Look no further than Shutterstock’s purchase of Amper Music in 2020 to bolster this argument.
The “Good” News
Is an algorithm making the essential, directional creative choices in the above cases? So far, mostly no. What is happening is that the execution (or production) of an artistic concept collapses in toward the person who owns the creative vision. Many creators will see this (understandably) as exciting and liberating. An ad agency Creative Director can make a model’s hips slimmer in post production by moving a slider in an app, rather that relying on a skilled retoucher. A musical Composer can hear his composition played by a band without having an actual band. A Graphic Designer can rapidly iterate visual concepts in search of inspiration.
For creative decision-makers, AI can be tremendously empowering. For the owners/originators of commercially valuable concepts, it may give them a kind of creative super power. And the brilliant works that would come from that should be anticipated and celebrated. But for the community of creative professionals who work collaboratively with artists to bring a vision to life (e.g. concept artists, photo retouchers, studio musicians, etc.), it doesn’t bode well.
It is hard to imagine that humans will be replaced as the arbiters of what is “good” when it comes to commercial creative works. All commercial creative endeavors are ultimately subject to the will of various stakeholders, like corporate managers, purse-string holders, attorneys, and clients, of course. An idea (especially a bold idea) needs a fierce advocate to build consensus before it can find its way into the world, and that is a very nuanced, complex process. The owner/advocates of creative vision provide the impetus for that process not just through their talent, but also through their passion, conviction, and the power of their track record and reputation. I find it difficult to imagine a world where computers do that.
An Uncertain Future
But make no mistake: if AI continues the incursion into creative workflows at its current pace, it will continue to displace human creative effort along the way. Technology, in all its forms, generally makes more things possible with fewer people and less effort over time. When it comes to AI/machine learning, that displacement is happening now and it is accelerating. Creative services are sensitive to this effect. Staff-cutting among creative services providers is inevitable. So we will continue to be inspired by (or profit from) sublime works of art. We’ll just be living in a world where artists are an ever-shrinking community. Where that will lead us in anyone’s guess.
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