What will AI do to the quality of work?

When everyone can create great works, what will it mean to be truly great at something?

When AI Makes Us All Da Vincis

AI has the potential to upend what it means to create, and by extension, what it means to be an amazing creator. Thanks to generative AI, you’ve got more than just potential – you’ve got a the ability to turn your wildest creative dreams into reality. Suddenly, every classroom can boast a gallery of masterpieces, and every student’s essay reads like it was penned by the Bard himself. (Get it? I fit in a Google Bard pun!)

Being exceptional

Syndrome was ahead of the game in The Incredibles: “If everyone’s super, no one will be”. In a world where AI churns out “great” work at the click of a button, we might find ourselves living in a world where there’s so much incredible creations that it will be a struggle to distinguish between the human creation and AI-generated content.

The human touch

Where does that leave our human creativity? This is where it gets interesting. As AI enhances our creating abilities, we may start seeing value in the creative side of the equation. AI appears to be creative, but its creativity is built only on what it has read. It can put that information together in creative ways, but it cannot create what it hasn’t seen. So for us, it could be no longer about what you create, but how you use AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The real magic happens when human ingenuity meets AI’s capabilities. Steve Jobs is quoted saying that “computers are like a bicycle for our minds” and AI is just another capability.

Generic

AI-generated works can be great, but a lot of them are pretty generic, with very little “spark”. A person who can use their raw emotions for creating will have a leg up on AI generated works. One aspect of AI work is that it feels like it was generated by a committee. While there are nuggets of awesomeness, those nuggets are buring under a lot of what feels like compromises.

Being Human

New technologies have always had this ominous “replacing humans” tone to them, but in the end, the outcomes are usually greater than what they would have been without it. AI is a new beginning to human creativity, challenging use to redifine what it means to human. Our imagination, our experiences, and our ability to connect with others on an emotional level are things that AI can’t replicate. They’re what make our creations not just great, but profoundly human.