I was talking with a creative technologist friend who develops AI tools for one of the major players about whether AI would replace or empower human creativity. We both agreed that AI still needs an experienced creative mind to guide it in making anything useful. But the bigger question—one we didn’t have such a clear answer for—was:
Where will the next generation of experienced creative minds come from?
As AI tools are increasingly designed to act like human collaborators–and as advertising agencies and film companies seek greater efficiency and profitability–I worry that we’re poised to dismantle the chain of mentorship that produces experienced creatives in the first place.
A New Kind Of Tool
While human creativity has survived waves of technological innovation, there’s never been a tool quite like generative AI, trained as it is on the history of human creativity. With the ability to summon whatever you can imagine by describing it, it fills in dozens if not hundreds of details that are not in your prompt. In fact, one of the biggest traps of AI is it seducing you into what it’s making vs. having the vision to force it to make what you want.
Creating with AI is about iteration, sorting through outputs, revising prompts, and selecting what works, guided by the user’s hard-won instinct for visual grammar, juxtaposition, structure, camera movement, color palette, tone – instincts that only come from years or even decades of study, learning, and doing. It’s no surprise that the best AI-generated work is coming from people that have spent their careers as professionals in traditional media.
Furthermore, these time-honored aspects of craft at the heart of human creativity often predate any technological advancements. (There’s no better source from which to learn narrative structure and character development than Aristotle’s Poetics, which is over 2,300 years old.) Human culture over centuries has accrued a collective knowledge of both craft and human experience which, when combined, is the language artists use to create memorable and lasting work. So the pressing question in the age of AI is:
How will the next generation of creatives inherit this collective knowledge to guide AI effectively unless we’re protecting the process of mentorship?
Many describe AI as being at the level of a junior copywriter or associate creative director: it’s helpful even if they don’t quite know what they’re doing. But AI is no doubt faster, always available, doesn’t ask questions, and doesn’t need a matching 401k contribution. It can lead to a slippery slope where, in the middle of a fast-approaching deadline, you click on your ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Runway bookmark instead of hitting up the junior writer, designer, or ACD on your team.
Those moments of interaction with younger talent when creating your larger vision are the building blocks of mentorship, a moment for them to understand the “why” behind your decisions, to see how the pieces fit in the whole, and most importantly the chance for them to ask questions of someone who’s been doing it a long time.
It may not feel like much, but when we outsource these smaller moments to AI, we’re unwittingly breaking the chain of mentorship that leads to the next generation of creative leaders. And if AI reduces or eliminates the entry level jobs, how will anyone ever set on the path to more senior roles?
The “Democratized Creativity” Argument
A lot of AI company CEOs speak about how AI democratizes creativity, putting the means to create professional grade images and video in the hands of everyone. I’m not opposed to technology giving people new ways to express themselves, but we’ve had a model for that for decades: it’s called karaoke.
Sure, it’s fun to belt out Someone Like You with your friends and feel like you’re connected to a favorite song, but that doesn’t make you Adele. That song only became a song you wanted to sing at Karaoke Night because of Adele’s commitment to developing her innate talent so she could express her feelings of heartbreak and acceptance after a real breakup – an act of human craft and creativity that resonated with millions of other people.
Giving someone the lyrics, melody, subject matter and performance style doesn’t make them a singer, just as giving someone a tool that can call up centuries of human creativity with a sentence doesn’t make them a filmmaker. To put a fine point on it:
If we break the chain of creative mentorship, all we’ll have is AI karaoke.
Learning What’s Beyond The Tools
Most creatives begin their journey by learning the tools of the trade: cameras, lighting gear, editing systems, Photoshop, or how to mix paint colors and what kind of brushes do what. This is a critical first step on the road of becoming a professional creative, but knowing how a piece of tech works has almost nothing to do with knowing how to use it to tell a compelling story.
Ira Glass, the creator and host of the radio show This American Life has a speech that I share with our entry-level hires and interns called The Gap, where he talks about how when people set out to make something there’s a gap between what they intend to make and what they actually can make. There’s a moment of disappointment that continues for a while when you see the distance between your intentions and your abilities. And a lot of people quit at that moment.
But he goes on to say that what lives in that disappointment is your taste, the part of you that longs to express something from your unique point of view. And the only way to close that gap is to do a lot of work, over and over, until it starts to close, and you internalize the hundreds if not thousands of decisions that go into creating memorable work.
Regardless of the tools, I believe there’s no way to shortcut that process, nor would we want to. For as difficult, time consuming, and even illogical a career choice in creativity is, this process is what has created every movie, book, sculpture, painting, and photograph that we love, that’s helped us make sense of the world, and made us feel less alone. It’s what makes us human.
As a creative community facing the tectonic disruptions coming with AI, its up to all of us to protect the value of this human creative process, and to make sure new generations inherit it.
I’ll leave you with a poem by Joseph Fasano, one of many teachers finding ways to address the impact of AI in the next generation of students…
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
by Joseph Fasano
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
*Midjourney Prompt
The following created the image in this post:
Collapsing rope bridge: a beautiful, cinematic wide shot vista at sunset of a mountainous countryside. In the foreground is a tattered and collapsing rope bridge with missing wood planks and dangling vines, unsafe for crossing, spanning a deep chasm between two rock cliff faces. Photo-real, professional photography.