The use of generative AI in creative work continues to create stark divisions in opinion. It sometimes feels that debate has moved on little in the last three years: there are evangelists who see AI as the gilded future and opponents who see it as the end of human creativity.
But could another kind of divide be emerging, not of opinion but of access and knowledge? The extent to which AI will change creative work is yet to become fully apparent, but a a new documentary dives into the nuanced views of a wide range of creatives and finds some interesting contrasts and contradictions.
The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) found that 90% of respondents expressed skepticism about generative AI, and yet 52 per cent said they were already using it professionally. But adoption appears to be far from equal.
SNAAP is based at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. For its Pulse Survey on AI and Work conducted late last year, it interviewed over 2,000 post-secondary arts and design graduates in a wide range of creative fields from more than 100 colleges and universities in the US to find how they feel about AI and how it's impacting their work.
The responses were compiled into the 19-minute documentary above by filmmaker Jan Oliver Lucks. The film reveals lingering concerns, including issues around copyright, privacy, environmental impact and creative integrity, as well as the ways creatives are actually using AI in their work. The result is a broad and honest overview of the range of opinions among creatives, from enthusiasm to cautious adoption and outright rejection.
The survey found that the extent to which creatives use AI tends to depend on how much their work already involved the use of digital tools. Logically, those in creative fields with a heavy dependence on digital software are more likely to have embraced AI tools. An architect speaks of using AI to generate 3D models from drawings and a graphic designer talks of making large backdrops from small images.
The video also suggests that a kind of AI divide may be emerging, with the likelihood of AI adoption higher among those who can "afford the risk" as the film puts it.
In a paper on the research, SNAAP Senior Research Fellow Joanna Woronkowicz and her team suggests that the "key inequality question is therefore not only ‘who will AI replace?’ but also ‘who has the time, trust, training, and work conditions to make AI useful?’”
In the film, creative director Ashley Veltre notes that her agency has a dedicated AI content creator who educates creatives and strategists on how to use AI. That's a luxury that most individual creatives and smaller agencies are unlikely to have.
Concerns around copyright and IP remain one of the big issues for many of those interviewed. Visual artists, such as illustrators are notably more circumspect than other types of creatives, both because of copyright fears and a frustration with tech companies profiting unfairly from their work to philosophical issues around the meaning of art.
Of course, AI is a broad term and there are many shades of grey. Most digital art software and graphic design software now includes some form of AI, but not necessarily text-to-image generation that tends to cause most controversy.
The short film shows some of the complex reality around AI's disruptive force. Some creatives see generative AI software as a tool that allows them to get the ideas in their heads onto paper faster. Others fear that art and creativity lose something in the process.
interestingly, theatre director Adam Marple and musician Adrian DiMatteo are hopeful that the rise of AI use in other fields of art could lead to a boom for live entertainment as people seek out one of the few art forms that they will still be able to identify as a real human experience.
