by Konrad Wefing
© 2024 Wefing, J.K. All rights reserved
Citation: Wefing, J.K. (2024) The threat of AI: Influencing our understanding and evaluation of human creativity available at https://www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk/threat-ai-influencing-our-understanding-and-evaluation-human-creativity-0
I believe that AI is a threat to human creativity, because it can change our understanding and evaluation of human creativity in harmful ways. In this essay, I will develop this argument in three main steps. I will first argue that AI might prompt us to understand the nature of human creativity as some sort of computational process, no different in kind to the processes governing AI. Next, I will argue that this shift in our understanding could also effect a shift in our evaluation of human creativity, leading us to employ similar metrics to human creativity as to AI “creativity“. Lastly, I will argue that these shifts that could be prompted by AI threaten human creativity, because they would preclude a richer understanding of human creativity, a deeper, marvelling engagement with the works of fellow human creators, and could hamper our use of our creative capacities.
In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger argues that technology exerts ontological influence over us, meaning that it affects our understanding of the essential nature of things in the world. A hydroelectric dam, for instance, can transform our understanding of the nature of a river, making it appear to us as essentially a source of hydroelectric power, rather than an independent, beautiful, natural entity.
Whilst the ontological influence of the technology that Heidegger describes, primarily relates to our understanding of natural entities like rivers, woods, metals, etc., I believe AI technology has the potential to affect our understanding of ourselves and our capacities, such as creativity. AI’s ability to compose music, generate poems, write stories, develop mathematical proofs, etc. - outputs we would ordinarily and intuitively classify as results of creative processes - seemingly reveals that creativity can be broken down into computable, algorithmic processes in which input data is used and recombined according to patterns and rules, thereby producing novel outputs. Even further, confronted with the beauty, apparent originality and quality of AI’s outputs, we are forced to respond to the question, whether AI might not, in fact, genuinely exhibit creativity. This invites us to examine our understanding of our own human creativity in response to and in the context of AI: Is our creativity not too just a matter of recombining information in some sophisticated computation according to certain patterns and rules, with the differences compared to AI mainly being due to the „hardware“ in which these computations take place (in our brain, rather than in a digital computer)?
This is the way in which AI exerts ontological influence over our understanding of the world: We are inclined to rethink the nature of creativity in general, and of our human creativity in response to and in the context of AI. A result could be this described understanding of creativity, as being some sort of special computational process; I call this the computational understanding of creativity. Unique features of human creativity, such as being intricately linked to conscious experience or intentionality, need not be overlooked, but the interpretation of the role they play in human creativity changes. Rather than themselves being defining aspects of creativity, they are reinterpreted as features necessarily accompanying the peculiar and somewhat mysterious way in which our brain happens to perform the computational processes constitutive of creativity. Thus, features such as conscious experience or intentionality are not understood as essential properties of creativity itself, and only feature in the essence of human creativity in this accompanying, derivative sense.
Not only does AI have the potential to change our understanding of the nature of human creativity, I believe that by means of effecting such a shift in understanding, AI could also affect the way in which we evaluate our creative capacities. This evaluative shift is further facilitated by our capitalist market system.
Under the computational understanding of creativity, it seems to make sense to evaluate human and AI creativity not in complete isolation from each other, but on the basis of similar metrics. As human and AI creativity are understood to be different, yet essentially of the same kind - some sort of computational process -, it suggests itself to compare these different processes side-by-side. Such comparisons do not have to be deliberate, however, once the computational understanding is adopted, it would only be natural for people to (maybe even subconsciously) view AI creativity in relation and comparison to their own creativity. This sort of side-to-side comparison of human and AI creativity is further encouraged by our capitalist market system. The market treats both AI-generated and humans’ creative outputs simply as commodities, which are judged on the basis of the same metrics, such as marketability, cost-efficiency, productivity, scalability, etc. that also overlook the unique features of humans creative processes (e.g. linked with intentionality, conscious experience, etc.). To some degree, the internationalization of these metrics of evaluation and the self-comparison of one’s creative capacities to those of AI is thus forced upon us: A creative worker simply needs to think in terms of the marketability of their work in comparison to that of AI, if they want to stay competitive and get paid. In this way, AI affects and frames the evaluation of our creative capacities. As humans are outperformed in many contexts in these side-by-side comparisons to AI, a toll on their confidence in their creative capacities could well be the result.
I believe both the shift in understanding and the shift in evaluating human creativity that could be prompted by AI are in some sense harmful for human creativity, which is why I believe that AI is a threat to human creativity.
For the shift towards the computational understanding of creativity to be harmful, it does not need to be incorrect. However, a richer understanding would emphasize much more how human creativity is fundamentally about and expressive of our unique human condition. It seems characteristically and uniquely human to consciously and emotionally experience the world, to engage in rational reflection and abstract thinking, and grapple with questions of purpose and meaning. These complex inner worlds that define the unique human condition fundamentally inform and find expression in human creativity. Even if it was correct that our complex inner worlds (involving conscious experiences, emotions, rational thoughts, opinions, etc.) that inform and find expression in our creativity were nothing but a quirky product of the way in which our brain happens to compute informations, to frame them as such would still mean to misinterpret them. I am convinced that our creativity is most profoundly and fundamentally about these inner worlds, much more so than about the computational process which might underlie them. I argue that this is the first, maybe somewhat abstract sense in which AI threatens human creativity: AI’s ontological influence can preclude a richer and more appropriate understanding of what human creativity essentially is.
More concretely, this would also affect how we engage with creativity. Adopting this richer understanding of human creativity opens us up to marvel at and be deeply moved by human creativity. Cave paintings, for example, become something that make us aware of the shared humanity between us and individuals living thousands of years ago. It connects us and makes us empathize with creators across space and time, and invites us to marvel at the beautiful mystery that is the unique human condition informing and finding expression in creativity.
However, as argued above, the computational understanding of creativity, reinforced by capitalist market pressures, induces the evaluation of human creativity in more shallow terms in side-by-side comparison with AI. This sort of evaluative comparison with AI risks taking a toll on our confidence in our creative capacities and affect the ways in which we make use of them. The most obvious example concerns the workplace, where AI might take over creative tasks like writing, designing graphics, content creation, etc. But there are further, more subtle ways in which our creative behaviours might change. We might start to be inclined to use AI for everyday creative tasks or our personal creative projects, too. Why bother trying to come up with a creative approach to a problem, an artistic design or an original way of putting a sentence, when AI essentially does the same thing, just better? It will be all too easy to conceive of one’s struggles and difficulties in the creative process as frustrating inadequacies, rather than as integral parts of authentic creative self-expression when compared to AI technology that never struggles and produces high-quality outputs almost instantaneously. Creators might more often merely develop creative ideas and use AI to perform the troublesome step of carrying those ideas out; their ability to authentically express themselves through creativity might suffer, compelled to seek uniqueness in differentiation of AI; or they might just start using their creative capacities less, altogether. This is the second threat to human creativity posed by AI: AI has the potential of changing how we evaluate, engage with and use our creativity. It can hamper the beautiful, deeply human, meaning, giving and satisfying process of authentically expressing one’s inner world through creativity.
(1) Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.