AI and True Creativity

One of the most common ways people, particularly marketers, greet each other now is “Hey, wow what do you think about all of this generative AI?”  “Is that affecting your business?”  You can sense the curiosity, but really the fear behind those words. This is because of hype. Now hype occurs when everyone goes to jump in one particular swimming pool for fear of the gates locking them out and them missing out on the big pool party! And then more times than not, the overall pool party experience wasn’t what was promised at all—and the majority of people leave.

Dot coms
PDAs
Web video
Crypto currency
NFTs
AI

All of these started with much more hype than substance. And we all heard plenty of trigger words like “groundbreaking” “world-changing” and of course my favorite, “solution.” And many weren’t able to recover from the disappointment phase of their growth curves. (…Ahem crypto and NFTs…we are looking right at you).

Now many people will claim that AI is “creative” and can “create” new things. These are people who don’t really understand what most generative AI tools actually do. As I’ve said before, humans create, machines imitate and that is still very true. A machine is incapable of actual creation — that gift (bestowed uniquely on humanity by God) has never been duplicated by any species or force on this planet.  

And have you noticed it all sorta looks and sounds the same? I have. And I think this homogenization of music, art and even marketing will be a HUGE advantage to those of us who still use our human abilities to actually create new and original things.

For example, generative AI CAN write lyrics for songs and poems—but SHOULD it if it does not truly understand them? Not really. How can you write about love with any accuracy if you can’t experience love? Or death — or paying income taxes! The AI is simply imitating something that came before (at a very high rate of speed) that it can access via its training information or in some cases, the live Internet/Web. So it’s not saying anything new. It’s not saying anything, really. And here’s my main point —

If you aren’t saying anything new, why say anything at all? To me, most things “created” by AI just aren’t that interesting beyond the novelty that they were generated by software. And that novelty will wear off REALLY fast.  

But when all marketing starts to look and sound exactly alike, it will lose a LOT of effectiveness (if it has any to start) while original ideas, concepts and human-created marketing will start to really stand out—and standing out in marketing is a very big deal. I think we might start to value individual creativity at a much higher level when we realize that AI-generated content really just isn’t that interesting to people.

Plus anything created by a human can be protected by US Copyright/Trademark laws and anything “created” by AI cannot. So you will never be able to really “own” it — much like your Netflix library — you can use it, but you don’t really own anything.  If you use AI to write a book and put it out, I could just take your exact same book and put it out myself under my own name and you couldn’t do a darn thing to stop me since the work isn’t protected by law.

Can you see where that might be going?

We communicate for a reason—and software is incapable of ever understanding that all-important why. Sure, the many tools and companies will be fun to watch and again novel. But God saw to it that only humans will ever have the ability to create something entirely new…from nothing. That will never change and this new era of AI marketing will be VERY good to those who still have something left to say along with the creativity to say it.