Creativity and Technology
Sunday, 18. June 2023 21:46
A week or so ago, I was discussing AI with a professor of art; his outlook was very pessimistic. When the topic turned to creativity, he went into a small tirade about the potential impact of AI on creativity. He said:
I also wonder what it will do for creativity. Will it help or hinder? Already my students look to social media and the web to find inspiration for problem solving. They don’t look into themselves for ideas and possibilities. They want to see what someone else did and mimic that. It’s easier, and, of course, there is no baseline for quality in that research.
And he went on to elaborate.
Of course, he’s right—some people will always take the easy way. For example, I know of a small graphics department at a nearby company that, since the advent of the World Wide Web, has not created a single piece of creatively original work. They spend their time “researching”—which really means finding something to mimic, if not copy outright. In their defense, however, I must note that they are terribly understaffed, and are often faced with unrealistic deadlines, so copying and rearranging is simply a method for survival. Not everyone, however, is interested in taking the easy way.
We know that students do spend enormous amounts of time on their phones, as do we all. But are we all looking at TikTok or Twitter or playing video games? Or are we rather doing legitimate research by using the tool that is most easily available? My guess is that there is a mix, and I have discovered that it is a fool’s game to try to guess what someone else is looking at on their phone at any particular time. Just yesterday, I was having lunch with a friend and we were discussing a movie, the name of which neither of us could remember, although we remembered the actors and the plot quite well. The answer was right there on the phone once we asked the right question. That was not exactly creativity, but it was legitimate research, albeit for conversational purposes.
And when one is working creatively, who is to say that looking one place is superior to looking another? Artists might well look into themselves for inspiration, but that self-search might well trigger the need to do some outside research, and there is no tool handier than the phone. Of course, one might prefer a desktop or laptop or a physical library or museum. The point is that in finding creative solutions to problems, one might use whatever technology is at hand for research. And that research can then trigger ideas and original solutions to whatever problem is being considered.
Certainly, we all know that it is really easy to waste time using technology. Whether one does that or not has nothing to with technology itself, but rather to do with personal discipline. We can fritter time away on various web sites, or we can utilize the same tools on different web sites to find that piece of information that we need to continue the project at hand.
To not use technology to aid creativity seems to be crippling ourselves for no good reason. If the tools exist to aid our creative work, we should learn to use them, and then pick the best tool to do the job.
Category:Creativity, Technology | Comment (0) | Author: Jay Burton