As AI’s role in creativity expands, a crucial question emerges: can a machine truly create, or is creativity inherently human? In this thought-provoking essay, originally published in RA Magazine and republished here with permission, Charlotte Appleyard, Director of Development & Business Innovation at the Royal Academy of Arts, explores the irreplaceable human connection at the heart of artistic expression.
Examining last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike and the evolution of artistic genius, Appleyard challenges us to consider whether the value of art lies in its output or the human experience behind it.
This essay forms part of the Cultural Comms Luxury Insights Report on Art, AI, and the Future of Creativity, produced in association with ArtTactic, and continues our exploration of how technology is reshaping the cultural and luxury landscapes.
In May 2023, 11,500 screenwriters went on strike in America. The action was aimed at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Their complaint was, in part, about the reduction in writers’ residual pay due to the dominance of streaming over programmed television. But more ominously for the industry, it was also a stand against the use of artificial intelligence in screenwriting.
The writers, already being squeezed on fees, feared they were going to be phased out in favour of far cheaper AI algorithms that could not only predict a hit but ‘write’ one too.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Writers Guild of America saw the benefit of AI in predicting popular themes for programming and even helping in the editing process, but its members did not want AI-generated scripts treated as ‘literary material’.
The use of the word ‘literary’ here is crucial in distinguishing between our sense of what is human and what is machine. Most people would feel instinctively that a computer imitation of Shakespeare is not ‘literature’, just as an AI-generated ‘Vermeer’ or ‘Rembrandt’ is not art. But where does that feeling come from? Why do we, and the writers, care so much?
We care because we have a profound intuition that art is a connection between one human and another.
It binds us together – either one to one with the artist or one to many in life. If an algorithm or text produces an object that impresses us, the impression can collapse when we are told it is produced by a machine. We may feel cheated, betrayed.
True creativity can only be human. Machines may create things, but who cares? Their works, so far at least, have not moved us in the same way.
Being creative is a highly personal, introspective experience that has to be interpreted rather than fully understood or defined. Once, the creative urge was explained by religion. In Ancient Greece and Rome, humans were not considered to be innately creative – rather, their gifts were endowed by a personal god, a muse, or a daemon. Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey by imploring his muse to inspire him, and the myth of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods as a gift to man, arose as a metaphor for the gift of creative inspiration. By medieval times, Western thought became dominated by a single dogma, that human creativity was simply a poor reflection of God’s creation of the universe.
With the Renaissance came a model of creativity that we are still familiar with today: that of the singular artistic genius. Previously, the primary ‘purpose’ of an artwork was for veneration or worship. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and their peers changed all that; their personalities became as much of interest to the public as the work they produced. The theme of the artist as a solitary genius continued over the centuries. Just as modernity is sometimes defined as man’s attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God, so thinking about creativity moved further from the divine and into man.
While this idea of singular artistic genius persists, thinking about creativity has moved on. Our definitions of creativity in the West today reflect our understanding that humans now are residents of a hyper-connected society. A few years ago, the musician Brian Eno coined the term ‘scenius’ (an amalgam of the words ‘scene’ and ‘genius’). He was attempting to explain what he saw as the faults in the concept of the artist as solitary genius, solely responsible for their work. He suggested that all art was the result of the artist’s constant observation of and toying with the world (or scene) around them. Their genius is not bred in a vacuum but in a social context.
In the case of the Turner Prize-winning design practice Assemble RA, communal creativity is a way of life. Initially coming together informally to discuss space and ideas, it’s now an established practice of approximately 16 active partners. One partner may lead on one project while collaborating on another, and there’s no figurehead or lead personality. Projects are divided up according to skills, interests, and time. Assemble member Maria Lisogorskaya describes the informal processes of social creativity in the collective’s south London studio. ‘For example,’ she says, ‘one partner might make a beautiful prototype using indigo-stained timber. Other members would walk past it on their way to the kitchen, through the open-plan office and think “that’s cool, I am going to use that in my project”. Before we know it, we have all these indigo-stained elements across multiple projects. The structure of our practice means that we’re inspired by each other on purpose and by accident all the time.’
Cornelia Parker RA puts this diffuse definition of creativity particularly succinctly, describing her creative process as ‘a microscopic jigsaw puzzle with tiny points of stimulus accumulated over time that come together in an instant, making you think that the idea came from nowhere.’ The idea that comes from nowhere is, in a way, a contemporary form of classical thought, the ‘tiny point of stimulus’ replacing the cast of gods and daemons.
Parker’s practice pre-dates the dominance of the internet and social media, but the contemporary digital experience makes her point all the more potent. We are all consuming information, ideas, and images all the time, so it should come as no surprise that artists might think of their process as shaped by innumerable stimuli. It does not denigrate the artist in any way to say their creativity should be understood through this social network; it simply reflects how we all exist today.
The problem with Eno’s theory of creativity is that it is also an apt description of machine learning. Just as the contemporary ‘scenius’ devours inspiration and ideas from the world around them, the algorithms the screenwriters were rallying against ‘learn’ by consuming vast quantities of information and then sorting it according to instructions set by the user.
The danger is that hyper-connection can easily be aped by a non-human process. Art, to repeat, is the product of an idiosyncratic creative process which results in the connection between humans.
The screenwriters may have been striking for money, but, in fact, they were also striking for our creativity and humanity, two mysterious qualities that are seldom mentioned during wage negotiations.
