Creative Intelligence is creative leverage
Putting the Art in Artificial Intelligence
Surreal, intricate, realistic renders of cybernetic landscapes. Moody, cinematic renditions of chimeric humans and beasts. An impossibly-expansive taxonomy of glossy 3D icons. Orchestral string music arranged and re-arranged to evoke new emotions with every turn.
These breathtaking graphics and music—which would have typically taken a skilled maker many, many hours of painstakingly detailed work—are now churned out by intelligent creative machines in mere seconds.
This sounds terrifying yet compelling all at once to creatives who have spent years honing their craft. Are we going to be out of a job? But hear me out: machine-enhanced creativity isn’t a threat to designers and artists; it’s leverage.
We are on the cusp of what I would call a Creative Leap Forward. With the commercial advancement of AI art protocols like DALL-E from OpenAI and MidJourney, or what LifeScore is doing for music, machine-enhanced creativity is fast becoming within reach. Far from automating or replacing creatives, these bots are a tool for augmenting and enhancing creative work.
Here are 6 ways I believe Creative Intelligence will shape the next decade of art and design:
1/ We will craft narratives rather than artifacts
Craft will move from the physical manipulation of matter and pixels to the molding of intellectual clay
Nurturing novel ideas and depth of thought will still be skills that need to be honed. Those key differentiators separate mediocre creative work from great.
2/ There will be a new Design role: the Curator.
The Curator’s core function will be to train Intelligence.
Their core craft will be to refine prompts, provide input, and tighten the feedback loop.
3/ Algorithms-as-a-service
Algorithms will serve up style. Each algorithm, as laid out in this great thread comparing the outputs from Dall-E and MidJourney, has its own aesthetic texture and interpretation.
Designers and artists will learn to use different algorithms like paint brush strokes as forms of expression.
4/ The act of creation will be democratized.
Not only will there be fewer barriers of entry to perfecting a new platform or skill (e.g. 3D rendering or photoshop), the language of AI instruction (primarily English) will be in tags, rather than syntax—this makes it much more accessible to non-native English speakers.
For example: a prompt would be as effective when written like this “people, lake, summer, afternoon, Seurat” as “a crowd of people lounge languidly next to the lake during a hot summer’s day, depicted by the painter Seurat”.
5/ Uniqueness will be commoditized.
One-of-a-kinds will no longer be novelty.
6/ A counter-intelligence aesthetic will emerge.
What will it look like? It’s hard to say. As much as cAI creations evoke possibilities now, its counter-aesthetics will reveal its limitations.
Creative Intelligence does not equate cultural intelligence
By cultural intelligence, I refer to the sense-making that artists and designers do that makes art relevant to its audience. It’s introspection. It’s philosophy. It’s an act of archiving, a subjective snapshot of our civilization in this moment in time. Humans bring that cultural context to the man-machine collaboration — at least for now.