AI: Augment, Accelerate, or Instigate?
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Will artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, accelerate or deplete creativity and innovation in today’s workforce? We are making an educated guess about the direction.
Despite the general perception that AI will greatly eliminate human creativity, many humans seem to be happy to have generative power in their lives. A recent survey conducted by Fishbowl, an anonymous social network for professionals, found that 43% of professionals have used AI tools such as his ChatGPT for work-related tasks.
So there is a push-pull in the workplace when it comes to AI and generative AI. It may act as a highly productive assistant to workers and professionals, or it may take over their role. Can AI be creative? can you?
It is common knowledge that humans always have the edge as creators and innovators. According to David De Cremer, Nicola Morini Bianzino, and Ben Falk in Harvard Business Review: “These new generative AI models can learn from vast datasets and user feedback to generate new content in the form of text, images, audio, or a combination of these. Jobs (writing, image creation, coding, and other jobs that typically require a high degree of knowledge and information) are likely to be uniquely impacted by generative AI. It is not yet clear what form it will take.”
De Cremer and his co-authors envision three possible scenarios for how AI will impact creative work.
Scenario 1: AI enhances work and increases productivity. Generative AI tools are the ultimate democratization of AI. “In fact, most of these applications are so easy to use that even children with beginner-level language skills can create content in no time,” said the co-authors. “Instead of putting many creators out of work, AI will not only support the work that humans are already doing, but also enable them to do it faster and more efficiently. Relying on AI tools increases productivity by reducing the time and effort required to come up with new ideas and texts.”
Scenario 2: Generative AI creates a flood of cheap content that will drive out human creatives. Intellectual property laws are still being worked out, and in the meantime content creation will run wild. “Unfair algorithmic competition and poor governance lead to the exclusion of genuine human creativity,” the co-authors speculate. “Here, human writers, producers and creators are swallowed by a tsunami of algorithmically generated content, with some talented creators even opting out of the market.”
Scenario 3: Man-made creative works require a premium. As AI-generated works could flood the market, people may be hungry for “real” and willing to pay for authenticity. “Generative models can be astonishing, sometimes emergent, but suffer from accuracy problems, frequently producing legitimate-sounding texts but de facto errors and erroneous ones. It’s full of logic,” said De Cremer and his co-authors.
Depending on the nature of your business, a combination of these scenarios can occur. To paraphrase the oft-quoted adage, culture eats technology for breakfast. “Culture changes much more rapidly than generative algorithms can be trained, so humans maintain a dynamism that algorithms cannot match,” the co-authors suggest.
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