The Intersection of AI and Creativity

Most discussions around generative AI in the author community have focused on copyright infringement and related economic issues. And, especially over the last couple weeks, you’ve probably seen countless screenshots from authors who’ve found hard evidence their work has been used to train AI models without permission or license. (If you somehow missed this, click here to catch up.)

But AI also raises significant existential questions about human creativity and art that could change our ideas about what art is and how it gets made. As a refreshing change of pace, such questions were discussed directly and thoughtfully during a panel at Publishers Weekly’s one-day conference on AI, “AI and Authoring: Creativity and the Machine,” moderated by Peter Brantley. The two panelists were novelists Sean Michaels and Gregg Hurwitz.

Michaels doesn’t believe he’s giving up his substance as an artist when using generative AI. He used AI tools to help compose his latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born? It’s about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI. Michaels said, “I believe very strongly in the power of creative people—of artists, painters, of writers—to use whatever tools are at their disposal, just as I believe in their power to draw inspiration from whatever forces are in their life, to make inventive, creative, beautiful work.” He continued, “It’s hard for me to imagine a world 10 or 20 years from now where another generation of artists isn’t making incredible work that is truly human driven but that draws on these tools in interesting ways—just as it’s almost impossible to think of fine art today without thinking about the way the internet or photography have disrupted and changed that.”

As a way of reassuring writers they won’t be put out of work by AI storytellers, Hurwitz argued that what people want to see and experience is human excellence. “People didn’t want to watch Deep Blue play a chess match against Deep Blue. They wanted to see how Kasparov could fare. No one wants to watch an AI-generated basketball game. We want to watch Michael Jordan soar.” He described how the TV/film industry’s big rush into streaming—driven primarily by financial moves to “appease Wall Street overlords”—didn’t turn out to be as beneficial or lucrative as holding on to some of the core artistic values that sustain traditional studios. “If there’s a big rush into AI [in book publishing], we might find ourselves in a similar place to right now, where we can be sitting in bed clicking through Apple TV and have half a trillion dollars of entertainment on display and none of it feels particularly special,” Hurwitz said.

Michaels wasn’t quite as optimistic as Hurwitz in this regard. He agrees that humans seek out excellence but believes people don’t necessarily know what they need—and they are often attracted to low-quality content. (He gave YouTube Kids’ content as an example.) “The market will start to gobble up this trash,” he said. However, Michaels doesn’t think we’re all doomed or powerless. “If publishers and the industry race toward the bottom, using low-quality content to give audiences what they think they want, before long audiences are going to start feeling hungry again,” he said. “There needs to be a certain amount of solidarity and long-term thinking about the future of the book, about the future of storytelling. We can’t just be skittering away toward where the easy, short-term money is. None of us can. Because it really hollows out this beautiful, gleaming jewel of the heart of civilization. That seems very grand, but I kind of mean it.”

Hurwitz recounted a conversation he had with a tech industry friend who believes AI might eventually be able to generate a new Nabokov novel. Hurwitz is not so sure. “To replicate something that’s already existing is a big strength of generative AI, but to make a leap of something that’s new, that’s random—part of that is what’s essential to the human experience. When I talked [to my friend] about a ‘spark of humanity,’ he laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, so you believe in magic.’” Which has pushed Hurwitz to think about this issue much more. He believes the development of AI will mean the author and the author’s “brand” (for lack of a better term, he said) will become more important than the book or series. “As we move through time, traumas happen to us, suffering happens to us, joy happens to us. … I don’t think that’s a path AI can chart.”

Another dynamic that works in favor of the human author: people’s desire for community. Hurwitz observed that work that feels new or that calls to people will pull them into community and shared conversations—and that dynamic will have a fundamentally human set of hands at the wheel. Hurwitz argued that even if AI makes it possible for readers to push a button and create the next Tom Clancy novel—or any story that’s written specifically for their tastes—it doesn’t deliver on the social aspect of reading and discussing what you’ve enjoyed with others. Without shared touchstones, “We’re all floating around like the characters in the Pixar movie WALL-E, being fed our own information, getting all of our own needs met in a microcosm where we are disconnected from an overarching narrative and we’re disconnected from each other.” He pointed to the social harm of this as well, using the example of pornography. Men today can have everything they can conceivably want as far as porn, “until the bottom has completely fallen out of human relationships and intimacy,” Hurwitz said.

The biggest danger writers face with AI? A technopoly. Both novelists believe it’s critical that big, commercial entities not take over AI and dictate the future. “ChatGPT is not a good barometer of where this technology is and what it’s capable of. It’s been deliberately configured to be as bland and banal and chat-servant-personal-assistant-ish as possible,” Michaels said. “I’m on the one hand impressed with what this tech can do, disturbed by it, delighted, unsettled. But at the same time, it’s very dangerous we’re moving toward this monolithic AI—certain really big AI companies and their tools are the ones that are being set up for us to use.” He said as we all imagine the future of this technology, we should want less of the big authority, “this big pyramid we go to,” and instead we should seek “gnarly weird familiars” that we have personally built and loaded onto our machine, “trained to our own weird creative peccadillos and interests and the kind of conversations we want to enter into, rather than some bland monolith.” He believes the more that we feed these oligopolies or giant AI corporations, the more art is pushed toward an industrialized mode.

“We want to emerge from this with humans being sorcerer Mickey and not necessarily the marching mops with the buckets of water,” Hurwitz said. He mentioned a recent study that revealed 93 percent of readers don’t want to buy a book that’s entirely by AI, and 97 percent of readers want publishers to state overtly on the cover if a book has been written using AI. “What we see is a demand for transparency. People don’t want to be duped. … If we can start with transparency and focus on solutions that elevate innovation and competition among technology, rather than moving in towards a technopoly model, then there’s a way that the industry at large can match and give readers what they want, what in fact artists want. … If things move to a straight game of regenerative or generative AI driven by algorithms, the winners are not going to be Big Five publishers or publishers in general.”

Bottom line: Michaels said that artists “can afford to be less insecure” on the issue of AI but acknowledged it’s challenging to discuss creativity and AI right now because writers naturally have anxiety about the economic issues yet to be resolved. If you can separate these two issues, Michaels said, “We can open ourselves up to the possibility that art has enough integrity and power— as long as we take care of each other—to kind of survive and flourish beside and with AI tools.”