The End of Creativity: How AI is Making Every Story the Same
At a recent wedding, two completely independent groups used AI to create tribute videos for the couple. Despite having different stories and no contact, both videos ended up nearly identical in tone, visuals, and narrative style. This eerie convergence suggests that everyday creativity is aggressively regressing to a mean, driven by our reliance on AI tools rather than genuine human expression.
Everyday creativity is aggressively regressing to a mean.
- 63
Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.
- pitchlatte
AI is merely exposing an already existing tendency. the creative output of the average non professional will always tend to the mean. it’s a tautology, that’s what the mean is. professional artists are treasured most of all for their _taste_, which tends to be novel and deliberate. the input of good taste into the Gaussian cloud of the average pulls it into new directions. the idea is in fact to improve the mean, that’s artistic education on a societal scale.
on the subject of AI, though: it definitely aggravates this trend.
- l33tbro
"End of creativity". Nice bait.
If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.
Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.
- CompoundEyes
People are just trying stuff out! In the mid 90s I received several homemade clipart color inkjet greeting cards from relatives that had just gotten a computer. Trend didn’t last too long.
- m000
Culture has been rapidly regressing to a mean long before AI.
See e.g. modern cars. Until the mid 00s, you could tell different brands apart from far away. And you could perhaps also tell a few things about the owner from the color.
Or movies. The past 20+ years of high-budget film-making has been mostly rehashing franchises and remaking what has already been made.
AI is perhaps accelerating the trend and eliminating many opportunities to witness something original (e.g. a quirky amateur wedding video). But the trend had already begun.