Three Things That Didn’t Kill Creativity and Why I’m Confident GenAI Won’t
As a species, we have a long tradition of making tools. And because the Universe loves irony, tools have a long tradition of making us… nervous.
Generative Artificial Intelligence is the latest in a series of transformations to the communication arts. From desktop publishing to mobile apps I have witnessed paradigm shifts that caused alarm. But, pondering GenAI’s place in this familiar arc of change gives me confidence about the future of making and distributing creativity. Each of these shifts were facilitated by a radical new technology but they were driven by our consistent desire to collaborate, create and distribute creative ideas more immediately and more widely.
Our fear of technological change traces its roots back 2.6 million years, to a time when sharpening rocks was a radical idea that excited some early humans and probably drove the club-and-sharp-stick traditionalists into fits of anxiety about the future. And yet, here we are standing on the shoulders of those creative giants of the Paleolithic.
From cave paintings and written language to digital publishing and GenAI we have been on a long and exciting arc in which more and more of the population can make and share their creations.
DTP — The Revolution Will Be Published
The Desktop Publishing Revolution of the 1980s happened as I went through college. It’s easy to forget how quickly we went from Mac Paint in 1984 to layered Photoshop files in 1994, and how radically digital tools accelerated the graphic design process. Ten years and the methods used to create successful graphic design had pivoted enough to land us all in the Technicolor Land of Oz.
Digital design tools that reduced the need for hard-won traditional skills raised concerns about the future of graphic design. Companies could now design their own catalogs and print small runs in full color. Publishing an underground ‘zine didn’t even require an X-Acto knife. Simply assemble on-screen and hit print.
And there I was with a shiny new degree in traditional graphic design — traditionally printed, foiled and hand-lettered ironically.
Starting my career in desktop publishing was a bit frustrating, but I was better positioned for the future than had I continued to rub down Letraset® dry-transfer type one letter at a time, once a disruptive innovation in its own right.
“The computer allowed anybody to design new typefaces and that became one of the biggest visual pollution of all times.”
— Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, 2009
The world was suddenly awash in ugly newsletters and garage sale flyers. Causing many to wring their hands over the idea of amateurs jumping onto computers without years of study and competing with professionals.
But we can look back and see that what was happening was another lowering of barriers to entry for participating in the communication arts in a way that would pay dividends in the future.
“Invite the reader to participate by deciphering. Chaos can attract and engage.”
— David Carson
Over time a new crop of talent, less tethered to tradition, arose and used the new technology to push the boundaries. Designers were now free to quickly explore image manipulation, different fonts, colors, and grids. For example, David Carson broke away from the grid entirely in search of expressive page layouts that would have melted Johannes Gutenberg’s brain.
We were on a compelling arc of publishing freedom — from the almost unimaginable expense of handmade incunabula through the complex but obtainable printing press — to an affordable laser printer on every desk. Those early handmade books were an act of preservation and control. Desktop publishing was an act of rebellion.
The printing press made new ideas more readily available and sparked an explosion in literacy. It’s worth mentioning that literacy was the sharp rock of the printing presses’ day and many worried what disaster might befall a society in which everyone could read.
Desktop publishing took things a step further by equipping more people to be designers, authors and publishers. Sure, it’s easy to point out the cringe-worthy use of clip art or comic sans. But there is also more truly brilliant, nuanced and expressive work than ever before. The good stuff lives on as inspiration and influence. Hand lettering isn’t dead and the grid is still the skeleton we lean on for both order and meaningful playfulness.
WWW — The Revolution Will Be Interactive
The Information Age (popularized by Al Gore as an information superhighway in the 1990s and reframed by Ted Stevens in 2006 as “a series of tubes” for the benefit of the club-and-sharp-stick backward compatibility club.) became the World Wide Web and thence the Internet — now a euphemism for “indispensable”.
Web design, like desktop publishing, lowered the cost of distributing ideas and design. As a distinctly new medium, web design attracted new talent who saw fresh potential and marveled at the notion that publishing now meant instant global availability. Design for “traditional media” was and is still wonderful but if you embraced the new digital media you were better positioned for the future.
By the year 1999, in addition to hand-coded websites, we had platforms like Blogger and LiveJournal which meant we had easy desktop publishing without even needing the printer or the paper. Innovators went nuts with the ones and zeros. Static pictures were supplemented by animated gifs, and eventually, entire websites were built in Flash. It was a time of explosive creativity and one of the things I loved most about this phase was how openly everyone shared what they learned, rapidly elevating the craft.
Publishing without the paper? Many wrung their hands. Print publication revenue models spent the 2000s doing the ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore’ thing all over again. Entire business models needed to be rethought. But the funny thing about rethinking is, as the genesis of innovation it is also the perfect response to it. Certainly, some publications collapsed and are missed. Others, particularly the newspaper industry, labored through the transition to digital models.
And yet, the New York Times app is beautifully designed. It always gets delivered on time and it’s never sitting in a puddle on my driveway. What’s more, it is searchable, savable and shareable. The type can be scaled up for accessibility or even read aloud. It can be updated as stories unfold, or as better images become available.
Seriously. For a guy who was cutting Rubylith® masking film in 1987, this seems like magic. Not to mention how amazing it was to go from the CMYK color gamut of 16k colors to the RGB color gamut of 16.7 million.
WiFi — The Revolution Will Be Spontaneous
The iPhone arrived in 2007 and quickly turned into a publishing platform in its own right. This made creativity more spontaneous than ever before. Fast, mobile internet connections inspired a slew of applications for digital publishing. Tools like Behance (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram and Pinterest (2010) had hockey stick adoption curves because our urge to create and share is even older than those sharp rocks.
Communities of interest sprang up everywhere and the number of individuals as publishers leaped into the millions. An interesting signal of the change was the way art museums pivoted from excluding camera phones to encouraging them. Soon QR codes provided extended content and social media became a powerful marketing tool.
Napster (1999) provides a thornier example and an early glimpse into the implications all this “sharing” (a euphemism for publishing) would have on our ideas of ownership, fair use and compensation. We can see now this phase was the tip of a moral compass upon which GenAI would soon impale itself.
On the one hand, artists and labels lost out on album sales. On the other, millions discovered new artists and had access to bootlegged concerts that otherwise would never have been enjoyed beyond a very limited audience.
In my mind, this was never a problem so much as a solution in search of new rules. The folks at Pandora (2000) and Spotify (2006) saw an opportunity and strove to provide legitimate publishing platforms with easy access to new artists, collaborations, covers and more. The compensation model still needs some work to better and more directly reward creators if it is to function as a mutually beneficial collaboration. (Something AI might be able to help with).
Regardless of your moral stance on copyright and compensation, what is clear is that a generation has been trained to expect sharing/publishing that is immediate, free and easy.
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”
— Robert L. Peters
Worldwide, there are 1.5 billion active monthly users on TikTok. 2 billion on Instagram and 3 billion on Facebook. There are an estimated 600 million blogs. Over 100 million tracks on Spotify. Meanwhile, UNESCO estimates there were 2.2 million books published worldwide in 2024. As of 2022, there were an estimated 12.25 million ebooks published on Kindle. Truly, this is an arc not so much about technology disrupting us as it is about us finding new ways to satisfy our appetite for distributing creative expression.
It is true, as the fraternal order of the club-and-sharp-stick preservation society asserts — this paradigm cuts both ways. Having a publishing platform in your pocket can be hard to resist. And we rightly fret about the consequences of being hyper-connected. But it is also true that creating and publishing has always been an act of provocation and we’ve always needed to figure out how to embrace what works for us while shielding ourselves from what doesn’t (without presuming to know what’s best for others).
Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said it best when he observed that “With great power, there must also come great responsibility.”. In his role as a moral foil, Ben would probably agree that great responsibility is a better problem to have than great ignorance and isolation.
AI — The Revolution Will Be Collaborative
So we come at last to the emergence of GenAI and there are certainly reasons to be alarmed. But my goal is to demonstrate that this new paradigm is part of a cumulative shift.
It has been particularly surprising that GenAI tackled creative endeavors first. Well, it didn’t really of course. First AI played chess and Go and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t seem to concern design. But now it’s got its fingers in every creative discipline. Personally, I had hoped it would usher in faster-than-light travel to other worlds. But alas it makes otherworldly cat videos.
“It’s the feeling of being an eternal student that keeps this profession interesting.”
— Adrian Shaughnessy
As with past toolset shifts, I am working to better position myself to be creative in the future. I’ve created illustrations with Dall-e, photographs with MidJourney, and music with Suno and MusicFX. I even used ChatGTP to help train a custom AI Concierge for an automotive client. New tools are coming quickly and the results are increasingly impressive. Yet, since entirely GenAI-created works are not currently eligible for copyright protection in the United States I’m not alone in my sense that something is missing.
So far, I find GenAI to be powerful not for its ability to give me exactly what I had in mind (it never does) but precisely because it doesn’t. It gives me unexpected, crazy mashed-up, sometimes absurd, interpretations that fuel my own brainstorming in unexpected ways. As creatives, we love surprises because we are passionate about creating novel work that stands out and stands for something.
However, this is an important paradox because typically the last thing you want from a tool is to be surprised. Just ask anyone who uses a circular saw for a living. So GenAI companies are hard at work trying to eliminate the hallucinations and uncanny valley effect. They see a productivity accelerator that serves me, where I see a collaborator that challenges me.
A focus on efficiency makes sense. The business of creativity often demands we work within constraints of time, budget, and branding. And, often we work with colleagues, clients or an audience in TL;DR mode. These conditions can quickly turn a string of enticing hallucinations into brand-damaging surprises. And yet, GenAI will need to make nonsequitous leaps like a human mind if it is to claim intelligence.
It is this tension that makes me confident that the way we currently use generative AI is not the way we will eventually use it.
Every Revolution is an Unexpected Visit From The Future
GenAI is the newest lowering of the barrier to producing creative work, but easier doesn’t mean better. GenAI is currently a remixing engine but remixing alone won’t advance us much. And if remixing is theft, GenAI will ultimately cheapen what we value about creativity and diminish us.
In the end, I think it is fortunate that GenAI came for creativity first because we’re a feisty bunch. Driven by our passion, we will make new demands of GenAI. We will seek reasonable constraints and incentives to participate. If we encourage them, new social norms will arise. This is what I hope to write about next because I think we are likely to see challenges to our traditions of permission, credit and compensation, trust and agency. Challenges that shouldn’t be left to unchecked tech business models.
The moral of this particular story is that I think the nature of collaboration is poised to change. The arc of published creativity suggests that we will adapt by partnering in new ways with teams that include a global community of humans and our newest tool. Contributors we will choose to celebrate and reward without feeling they diminish our own role. For that to be true GenAI needs to be more than an easy button, more than a remixer. It needs to be a partner that forces us to think harder, challenges us to sharpen our skills and stride forward into the future.
I am confident about this because our entire history is defined by this exchange with our tools. We make them. They make us nervous. And then we go on to make unimagined progress… which makes the next tool almost inevitable.
