I first want to state that this blog post is not completely anti-AI. I am not naive enough to think AI is going anywhere or to ignore that there are some useful cases for AI. However, I am afraid that by using generative AI so much for creative things we are beginning to lose what creativity is all about.
Using AI is all about efficiency. We live in a society now that wants everything done yesterday and with the least amount of hassle. The quicker we get it done the quicker we can move on to the next project and the more money we can make. At least that is what we are being told AI will do for us. Make us more efficient.
But creative work was never about efficiency. As someone who has done professional creative work for quite a while now, I do understand deadlines, quotas and being efficient with your time. A big part of creative work though is the process.
That is what got me into design and photography in the first place. Getting lost in your thoughts and trying to convey that through a design or a photograph was an escape. Seeing a logo start out as a crude sketch on a napkin and going through the process of scanning it into Illustrator and then tweaking it till it became a full on brand with variations and a pleasing color pallet that a company could then use and be identified by. There is something so satisfying about that.
Also within that process is when your creation becomes refined and gets better and better until it is complete. That is something we lose with prompts. Sure prompting is quicker, but it’s not creative. It lacks the human touch that a machine can never replicate. Not to mention we could have a whole separate conversation on how AI generated logos and images are simply copying already created human designs and look quite terrible. But that is a different post for a different time.
The point of this post is to caution you against losing your unique creativity. If we are not careful we are going to prompt our way out of creativity. As AI gets better and better I know it will get to the point where it is creating quality work and less “AI slop”, but at what cost?
I would hate to see us get to the point where we create everything with a prompt. Where is the creativity in that? Where is the human touch. Remember, creativity is not about being more efficient it’s about the actual act itself. The process, the mistakes, the revisions…the human touch.
Living in a world where every photography, every image, every logo and every flyer is “perfect” sounds so boring. I don’t want perfect, I want human creativity.
Some of my fondest “creative work” memories are sitting in the woods on an overcast drizzly winter day in Cades Cove waiting on a deer to walk by so I could photograph it. That experience means more to me than the actual photographs I produced. It was the process that I remember more than the end result.
And the end results were not perfect, but they were real. They carry emotion, they tell a story. Many of the photos from that trip hang on my walls and the walls of friends and family that I gave as gifts. I love when people ask “who took that photo” and I get to relive the story all over again as I tell them about sitting in the cold rain for hours thinking that I wasted a trip only to see a majestic buck sneaking through the tall grass. Sure the photographs I took have mistakes and errors and are not technically perfect, but they are perfectly human. They are mine. They were not created with a prompt.
Remember, the easiest path is not always the best path to take.
Don’t prompt yourself out of creativity.
