A few days ago, an article was published on Ars Technica that, as a creative person, I thought I should share here. As the title implies, it is about protecting human creativity from the onslaught of AI.
Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.
Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.
A limited resource
By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences.
But human creativity isn’t the product of an industrial process; it’s inherently throttled precisely because we are finite biological beings who draw inspiration from real lived experiences while balancing creativity with the necessities of life—sleep, emotional recovery, and limited lifespans. Creativity comes from making connections, and it takes energy, time, and insight for those connections to be meaningful. Until recently, a human brain was a prerequisite for making those kinds of connections, and there’s a reason why that is valuable.
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Ars Technica
I create a lot of content in various forms: writing, coding, music, woodworking, etc. While I’m not too concerned about AI casually being able to do woodworking any time soon like it can generate text, it’s still concerning how much of what it is producing is filling the internet and is advertised as art.
I do have to admit that I use the occasional AI-generated image for the title images of some of my blog posts, but I label them clearly and don’t try to pass them as my own work because, well, they’re not. They’re machine-generated and I only use them if I can’t find something suitable on Unsplash or any of the other royalty-free image websites with images created by humans.
In ay case, I can recommend reading the full article on Ars Technica here and giving the subject matter some thought as well.
