Have you ever broken up with someone because they said that generative AI could replace the work of creatives? Me neither, but fittingly it did speed the process up.
From environmental and security concerns, to embarrassing search engine faux-pas, hallucinations and discrimination, there’s no denying that generative AI’s boom in recent years has come with its fair share of controversies. (I highly recommend watching these videos in which YouTuber Drew Gooden goes into detail on the plethora of ways in which AI is overrunning society.)
My focus, however, is on the impact of generative AI on the creative industries. The short version of this article is that I cannot understand why we are so desperate to render ourselves obsolete. And by "we", I of course mean profit-hungry tech giants. And by "obsolete", I mean replaced by soulless AI-produced garbage which all looks and sounds the same.
I should be clear that I am not referring to the use of AI as a springboard or tool to aid the creative process. What I am referring to is using AI to create entire pieces of “art,” be it music, literature, or images, and in so doing threatening the livelihoods of those who have dedicated their lives to mastering their chosen art form. I see the issues facing creatives as threefold.
1) Losing control of your intellectual property
First, AIs are trained on vast quantities of existing art. This is often without the creators’ consent and often without remuneration. Any artist’s style can be imitated by generative AI, potentially breaching copyright and stealing their intellectual property.
Take the example of Adobe’s Firefly, a text-to-image tool included in the design staple Adobe Creative Cloud. The AI is mainly trained on images in Adobe’s own library, Adobe Stock. However, in 2023 it was reported that Adobe Stock contributors claimed they were not consulted on the use of their artwork in this way. Stock contributors are paid a commission for every download of their artwork. However, they say that fewer people are now downloading their work because users can simply generate their own images using Firefly, or download the AI-generated images which now pepper Adobe Stock. This means that Adobe is now effectively competing with its own contributors, with an AI trained off their own artwork.
Meanwhile, in the UK, planned changes to UK copyright law will make it easier for AI companies to train their models on artists’ work, “without permission or payment.” This has been met with fury across the creative industries. As part of the “Make It Fair” campaign, more than 1000 musicians have released a silent album entitled “Is This What We Want?”, protesting the “theft” of their music to benefit tech giants.
2) Flooding an already competitive market
Second, given the speed at which AI can generate masses of content, creatives, who are already in stiff competition with each other, now risk being crowded out by a potential influx of AI-generated content flooding an already competitive market.
For example, writers, who are already competing for their readers’ attention amongst the two million human-written books published each year, may get lost in a saturated market of AI-written content.
In the case of music, the majority of artists already struggle to make an income from streaming. Last year, more than 100’000 artists made more than $6000 from streams on Spotify… out of the 12 million artists on the platform: that’s less than 1% of the artists on Spotify. And now, over and above competing with each other for streams, musicians have to find ways to be heard in the din of shoddy AI-generated music, which is increasingly being recommended to listeners. Unfortunately, the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, has no plans to ban AI-generated music from the platform.
3) Losing your dream job to a computer
Third, if AI can produce content which passes as human for free, there is little incentive for companies to pay creatives for their work. This has already resulted in job losses across the creative industries, and in some cases, significantly changed what creative jobs look like.
The gaming industry has been hit hard by generative AI. In 2024, one in 10 game developers lost their jobs, including developers working in storytelling, production, visual arts, and game design. A recent survey conducted by CLV Economics found that nearly 90% of video game companies are working with generative AI, predicting that generative AI “may contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to 10 years.”
2D artists have been some of the worst affected by these mass layoffs. As one game developer explains, “Why get a bunch of expensive concept artists or designs when you can get an art director to give some bad directions to an AI and get stuff that’s good enough, really fast—and get a few artists to clean it up?”
Another field under threat is copywriting (writing marketing material and text for advertising purposes). In a recent article, the BBC told the story of a copywriter whose team of more than 60 writers and editors was laid off one by one. His job went from writing engaging posts and articles for a tech company to combing through pages of AI-generated texts and fixing their mistakes. It was a tedious and soul-destroying task, which paid less than the writing copy from scratch. He was left humanising the copy written by the very AI which had taken over his job, until eventually even he was sacked by his employer.
If the point of automation so far has been to cut out repetitive jobs, in this case, AI achieved just the opposite. It transformed a once exciting and creative occupation into a never-ending, monotonous slog.
In conclusion…
I can’t help but feel like a Luddite for writing this article, but I do feel that generative AI is different to the technical advancements of the past. Although technological revolutions have often inflicted pain on those immediately affected, they have ultimately created more jobs. However, more recent technological innovations have not done that. Since 1980, in the US, technology has replaced more jobs than it has created. The IMF warns that in advanced economies, about 60% of jobs could be affected by AI, of which half would be negatively impacted (through reduced demand, falling wages, and decreased hiring). This dual impact may worsen inequality.
And so I have to ask who this generative AI revolution is really serving. The truth is, tech giants are not on our side. They don’t care about protecting jobs, they are just after profit. Not to mention that the companies which use AI to produce content are actively harming the creators whose content it is reproducing, robbing them of their livelihoods and their intellectual property by using it to train their AIs.
There is then, of course, the question of the quality of jobs we will be doing if AI changes work as we know it. A recent Cadbury’s ad raises an important question: “Is AI really helping us work less, like we thought, or making us work even faster? Because it’s only going to get worse: if we’re forced to keep pace with super efficient AIs, will we ever get adjusted back and do nothing?” Technology used to take over “dirty and repetitive jobs,” but what if it is now taking the jobs that humans were perfectly happy to do? For many, creating art full-time is their dream job. Why would anyone want to take that away?
And even if none of this happens, and millions of people aren’t left jobless, the question still remains: who wants to consume AI-generated art? In my opinion, art is one of the best parts of life. Most of what many of us do for enjoyment is either consuming art or making it ourselves. A 2024 YouGov poll of respondents’ favourite activities found that 87% enjoy watching films, 85% like listening to music, and 78% enjoy reading books, all of which is the product of the creative industries.
What companies who choose to use AI-generated content do not understand is that this shortcut will hurt them in the long-run. The great skill of creatives is making art which speaks to and connects with the consumer, something that AI will never be able to do. Generative AI is only capable of reproducing content that already exists. It cannot create anything new. It cannot achieve what makes art so precious: it cannot reflect the human condition and the times we live in. It cannot develop new genres: it might be a revolution but it will never be revolutionary. So why on earth would I be interested in consuming the so-called “art” that an AI regurgitated in response to some lazy prompt?
We as a society may enjoy the novelty of being able to create images and films on command, but I have to believe that at some point, people will want more from the content they consume. As the quote goes, "At some point, we ask of the piano-playing dog, not 'are you a dog?' but 'are you any good at playing the piano?'" Let’s just hope that by the time we realise we would like to see some quality art, we won’t have allowed AI to edge our creatives out of their own space.
Left unchecked, generative AI has the capacity to wreak havoc on our creative industries, destroying livelihoods and reducing the quality of the art which I think makes life worth living. And all so that, with a few short clicks, we can see a picture of a cat in a baseball cap riding a motorbike in Hawaii.
