AI and Creatives: Content Creation Machine

The Content Creation Machine

As creative people, we spend years learning a skill, perfecting it and sharing what we've made with others. Artificial intelligence is moving in and the ability to create content for online sharing is now lightning fast. Will this search for producing quick content water down our understanding and appreciation of the creative process and will we become desensitised to the art work that we're seeing online?

We dedicate years to growing our skill set and developing our hand-stamp whilst enjoying the process of creating something new. In this blog post I'm thinking more about how AI is changing the content we consume online, what impact this is having on us and how we approach our creative processes now that we have AI looming over us.

I mentioned in the previous post AI and Creatives: A New Tool just how quick and simple it is to generate AI images. Simply type in a few words, click a few buttons and generate a piece of 'art' in seconds. Job done, throw it onto the internet and get on with your busy life. But do we actually connect to this thing we've just produced? Do we connect to the other bits of AI generated content that appears in front of us on our already saturated social media platforms? Do we actually learn anything from creating these quick images?

When gathering inspiration in the offline/analog world, a journey to an art gallery might be taken, books might be flicked through and sketches might be made. A physical activity has happened, a memory of those events has been mentally stored, random discoveries might be made along the way. Turning to the internet and social media for inspiration, the quick paced, AI generated catalog of 'stuff' can be overwhelming. After an hour of flicking through, can we actually remember what we've just looked at, was it so quick that we had time to consume and absorb it?

Not so long ago 'content creator' was a shiny new futuristic job title and these individuals would research their audience and serve up the keywords, colours and voice of the brand they were supporting, there was a real skill to getting the tone just right. As budget cuts tighten and AI is more accessible, these jobs might be some of the first to go. As companies set to fill every gap of our newsfeed with advertising, AI makes it quicker, easier and cheaper for them to do so. But at what cost? As it's still the early days, most of us can still tell the difference between what is written by a human and what is written by AI - fair enough, this might improve over time but for now there are still some improvements to make. Human error is what makes us human and that's something we can connect with. Vague and generic posts advertising a product or service are just not going to grab and retain the attention of the audience.

The cost of AI generated content

There's a big cost to just creating AI generated content willy-nilly to post online in the way of promoting business and that's a cost to planet.

Now, call me completely naive but until a short while ago, I just believed that the internet ran on magic and that tech giants at Google tapped on keyboards to keep it all running smoothly. Now that I know that isn't the case, my eyes have been opened to the carbon footprint that is swiftly swept under the rug...

Of course the data has to be stored somewhere and of course that takes a physical form of whopping great databases as well as electricity to keep them running.

So all of the content you've seen online today (including this blog post) is stored somewhere physically and that takes electricity to store and adds to the carbon footprint of the internet. Just as we might cycle to work one day a week, turn the heating down in favour of a jumper or unplug the telly at night, our internet use also has a carbon footprint that we're feeding into - but that we can do something about.

So now what?

One starting point that I believe we can fight this AI generated beast is to consciously consume when we're online. By aimlessly scrolling through quick AI generated content, the algorithm might show you more of it and in turn you're telling the social media platforms that it's worth it for the companies who are advertising to keep investing in and producing cheap content.

However, by clicking onto blogs that you find interesting or clicking onto websites that take you away from social media sites, you are protecting your attention span and making an investment into the things you want to see more of and want to learn from. Be conscious and selective about what you're posting and what you're letting into your brain space. We can't control what the big companies do with our newsfeeds but we can vote for higher quality online content and invest into our own creative skills.