Creating in the Generative AI World
Or how generative AI tools may help bring about greater human creativity
The astonishing rise of Generative AI in the late 2022 has created a lot of excitement, drama, acrimony, and confusion. In the tech world alone this is pretty much the only major thing that anyone has been talking about, especially since the release of ChatGPT. It is fair to say that everyone understands that something epochal and monumental is happening, but it’s impossible with any certainty to make any definitive predictions, either now, nor in the intermediate or long therm. However, I’d like to make one, fairly modest, prediction. The advent of powerful Generative AI is somewhat of a Deep Blue moment for knowledge work.
Deep Blue was a purpose-built IBM supercomputer with a single purpose in mind: becoming the best chess player in the World. To achieve that status Deep Blue played competitive matches against Gary Kasparov, the best human player in the World. It lost ldthe matchup in 1996, but it won in 1997. At the time the victory was more symbolic than anything else. Chess was considered the crown jewel of human intellectual ability, and to see a machine become better than us at it was profoundly humbling in some sense, even unsettling.
Within a few years superhuman chess software became widely accessible. Instead of waning interest in chess, a whole new generation of chess players grew up with unlimited access to the best chess player in the world. Many young players sharpened their skills against such a formidable opponent. The quality of human chess improved dramatically. We can only speculate, but it’s very likely that most top human chess players in the World today would have easily beaten almost any past World champion if such a matchup were possible to pull off.
I believe that something similar will happen now with the ready access to Generative AI tools. Many onerous intellectual tasks could become far less so when done in collaboration with AI agents. Barriers to entry for creative work will be lowered. Many people with interesting ideas and no years of formal training will become able to bring those ideas to fruition. The feedback loop between tinkering with something and getting an outcome will become super short, enabling everyone to iterate with their work at a previously unprecedented pace. In other words, human creativity will improve, and become immeasurably greater than it ever could have been without a ready access to these advanced AI tools.