One time I bought tires from what I think was the Russian mob, it wasn’t on purpose but the tires were a great deal. The interaction was like a movie, he showed up in a small hatchback completely filled with tires of various sizes. I found him on craigslist and he acted like he was local to me but was really 3 states and over 6 hours away. Driving for all that time in a tiny car, full of tires, must have been a weird experience for him, or maybe this is a regular occurrence. He likely has a million stories and now I got a great deal and my own story with him too. This is all to say that the problem with AI truly matching human creative is context and experience.
Beyond hyper specific stories, an AI will never experience anything that helps shape new creativity. It will never experience the rejection of love, it won’t know the rush of being late for a flight, or having a bad meal and the subsequent consequences of said meal. The human experience is basically impossible to replicate in code.
It’s those life moments that shape how we perceive everything else, and where creativity spawns from. No machine will ever experience the stress of taking young children to Target to only have them throw a tantrum on the floor. Or have the concern that they might fill their diaper while at a store without changing area. But really AI will never know the true stress of when the consequences of that bad meal hit while you’re at Target and now you have to sit on a toilet in a bathroom that wasn’t cleaned in the last 24 hours while holding your baby1.
These experiences shape everything in our lives, especially creatively. You can try to prompt an AI model to tell this story but it will never feel the panicked stress-sweat of these chaotic experiences. I’ll concede that there’s a possibility that a model has absorbed a thousand stories about children having meltdowns in stores. However, this precisely highlights the issue: it provides an average of a thousand tantrums, and let’s be honest, the average tantrum never actually occurred to anyone. Every parent has a story. The specific scenario, where myself, a baby, and a bad meal converged in a disgusting bathroom (that hadn’t been cleaned in at least a day), only exists because it was real. It’s lived in; the whole life is stranger than fiction type of thing.
As we are fighting against a wave of AI slop, there is something that is being missed in all of this. The creative output of the human experience will always outdo anything AI will provide. I’m not saying AI cannot be entertaining but it will never carry the weight of a lived experience. I think that’s what is missing from all the handwringing, you can be entertained but it doesn’t have to replace the great American novel.
We observe this phenomenon in social media and short-form videos. These are all deceptive and manipulative, irrespective of AI involvement. Their sole objective is to generate engagement rather than fostering creativity, which many find entertaining too. Although, on most social media, even when human-made content is present, we are often prioritizing falsehoods over originality. Is this any different that pure AI? To me the distinction between human and machine content seems to be getting more blurry by the day. I’m willing to take the perspective that the broader implication is that there may be a future for both types of content. The outcome will depend on your preferences and the content you enjoy.
Beyond the output, for me, the more interesting question is the future of creativity and that recognition is now nebulous at best. I believe its fair to say that a label of human or AI won’t rectify poor writing, but it may diminish actual good writing. For me, the byline isn’t a reliable indicator anymore, but rather whether the work emanates that unmistakable scent of stress, an unclean bathroom, and an occasional bad meal.
These are all known traumas to parents. Some of us may have just had it worse.