It's only creativity if...
Moving goalposts put VFX artists on wrong side of "creativity" divide
The easiest way to keep claiming that AI isn’t creative is to define creativity as whatever AI can’t do yet. The trouble with that definition is that it increasingly puts humans on the wrong side of it.
We live among AIs that can write 10-page epic rhyming poetry, about a haircut, where every word starts with the letter s. (See this post from last month for context.) We live among AIs that can independently beat the daily challenge in the game Slay the Spire 2. As Ethan Mollick, the researcher who posted both those results, put it:
Slay the Spire 2 is a very complicated game, with lots of choices that have large-scale strategic implications that may not pay off (or doom you) for many moves, along with careful resource management. And it was released post-training period.
If you told a human who had just pulled off either of these feats that they hadn’t actually done anything creative, I think they would beg to differ.
If pressed, some might say that humans solve these problems with creativity, while AI solves them in some other, more mundane way. But at that point, it’s unclear whether the word “creativity” is anything more than a brand name, like how it’s only champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France.
If the point of the branding exercise is to protect the livelihoods of human creatives as if they are French vintners, I would argue that it’s already failing.
There was an article in the Hollywood Reporter a few days ago about how Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI visual effects company for $587 million in cash. My eyes popped out at the amount, but I wasn’t planning to write about it because the purchase itself was old news, and it looked like a pure business story. But then I saw where the journalist described the company as having a “particular emphasis on upending visual effects without impacting the creative part of filmmaking.” (bold mine)
VFX isn’t one of the creative parts? I thought maybe that was just the reporter’s gloss, but a blog post by Affleck states:
I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it.
This “human creativity” apparently does not extend to the work Affleck says they trained their first model to do:
[It was] trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting.
So yes, the claim is that achieving aesthetic effects under challenging real-world constraints doesn’t require creativity. Got it. Has anyone told this to actors, directors, and film crews wrapping up a tough shoot?
The moral of the story: Insisting that AI can’t be creative doesn’t keep it from coming for your job. It just causes people to decide your job was never creative to begin with.
This pattern isn’t new, by the way. It goes back to well before the ChatGPT era. Check out the latest video from Rational Animations for a history of the moving goalposts around AI creativity.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.