Let’s skip forward to the near future where any painting you want to create or essay you want to write is manifested simply by describing it to an A.I. One problem with such a future is that an A.I. can only imitate styles that already exist.
And those styles do not come from computers. Computers, unlike us, are not sentient. They possess no actual judgment or opinions or creativity.
The wondrous A.I. that so many people are now playing with is an elaborate mirror. It is merely echoing back to us our own collective creative thoughts, which it obediently recombines in all sorts of ways.
As these sorts of A.I. become widely used, there will be less incentive for people to put the effort in to create new works that introduce original ideas. If we don’t want our culture to devolve into endless variations of the same unoriginal patterns, we will need to find a way for those ideas to make their way into the mix.
I wonder whether a new sort of specialty will emerge — creative people who continually insert new ideas into the ever more powerful A.I. recombination engine that everyone else will use.
It is not clear to me whether these future creatives will actually write entire novels or or paint pictures or pick out songs on their guitars. They may instead use some sort of computer interface that will immediately fill out and instantiate their creative ideas.
But they won’t be just using the A.I. engine the way most people will. They will have a more serious purpose — preventing future culture from devolving into a mass of endlessly repetitive and meaningless treacle.