“With any degree of laudability.”

A little while ago, I wrote a thing.

Reading it again now is interesting. And slightly painful. I wrote:

“I don’t see a time where machines are writing ads. Or poems. Or plays. Or sonnets. Or songs. Etc.”

Well. They can.

They can write ads, poems, plays, sonnets and songs. They can make images of things that never existed. Films that were never filmed. Voices belonging to nobody. Music without musicians. They can write code, build presentations, develop campaign ideas, create brand strategies and produce thousands of words of perfectly serviceable copy before you’ve finished making a cup of tea.

So I got that bit wrong. But there’s a sentence that immediately followed that I’ve been thinking about.

“At least not with any degree of laudability.”

Not whether machines could make things. Whether they could make things worthy of admiration. And I’m beginning to think even that misses the bigger question. Because perhaps AI doesn’t need to become brilliantly creative to transform the creative industries. We just need to stop caring whether the work is brilliant.

For most, good enough is good enough.

Generative AI is already capable of producing an enormous amount of work that is perfectly adequate. That’s not an insult. Adequate is incredibly useful.

Need a graphic for a presentation? Done. Thirty seconds of background music for a video? Sorted. A voiceover? Boom. A thousand words of web copy? Punched. A photograph of something that doesn’t exist? Completed it mate. A few campaign ideas for tomorrow morning? Give it a minute.

A lot of it is bland. Some of it is dreadful. Left unattended, it has a remarkable ability to produce weapons-grade bollocks. But increasingly, it’s good enough. And good enough is cheap. Good enough is fast. Good enough doesn’t need briefing three times and doesn’t miss the deadline.

Which makes me wonder whether we’ve spent too much time asking the wrong question. We’ve been asking whether AI can become as creative as humans. But it doesn’t need to. It needs humans to stop caring about the difference between magnificent and meh.

Do we actually care?

That’s the bit I find fascinating. If a piece of AI-generated music works perfectly well underneath a 30-second film, does the person who wrote the prompt care that nobody wrote the music? Same for an AI-generated image. Same for 10,000 words of machine-generated web copy.

Scale that up and the question becomes really uncomfortable. If an AI can produce something that’s ‘acceptable’, in seconds, for a tiny fraction of the cost, how often will somebody pay for the remaining 20%? And what happens if we gradually become accustomed to that 80%?

The threat to creativity may not be that machines become extraordinarily creative. It may be that humans become extraordinarily tolerant of mediocrity.

There’s an irony here. The creative industries have spent years preparing themselves for exactly this moment. We’ve measured, tested and optimised. We’ve built templates and systems. We’ve created content at scale. We’ve chased clicks, conversions, engagement, reach and whatever metric happens to be flashing on the dashboard this week.

Somewhere along the way, creative work started looking increasingly like something that could be calculated. The punts stopped being taken because everyone became scared to death of a drop in ROI.

Then the machines turned up.

But here’s the other possibility.

There’s another side to this. I think we’ll reach a point where everybody is assisted by machine thinking. And I mean everybody. The writer. Designer. Strategist. Filmmaker. Musician. Architect. Engineer. Accountant. Teacher. Student.

This genie is not going back in the bottle. Using AI won’t be a specialist skill or something worth mentioning on LinkedIn. It’ll just be how we work. Like using a Mac. Or a smartphone.

And when that happens, something interesting changes.

The baseline moves.

If everyone has access to a machine capable of researching, questioning, generating, analysing, writing, visualising and challenging ideas, the average person becomes capable of producing work they couldn’t have produced before in several lifetimes. The barrier to entry is less than zero. Yesterday’s exceptional becomes tomorrow’s ordinary.

We aren’t there yet. Right now we’re still fascinated by what the technology can do. We’re still comparing AI-assisted work with work created without it. We’re predicting human extinction and ‘silicon lifeforms’. Eventually the distinction disappears and AI-assisted work just becomes work.

A bit like ‘new media’. Remember that?

Once everyone has access to machine thinking, we’ll discover who can punch above it. Who sees something the machine doesn’t and makes the connection that nobody and nothing else thought to make? Who’s going to say “no” and “do it again”, over and over and over again, until it is brilliant?

There’s another irony here.

I’ve been discussing this article with an AI. Obviously. Not asking it to write an article for me while I go and make a sandwich. Discussing it. Arguing with it. Testing ideas. Following thoughts. Rejecting others. Occasionally telling it that it’s missed the point entirely. Which it had.

The interesting thing is that somewhere in that conversation, I’ve become clearer about what I think. That’s increasingly how I use AI – or machine thinking as I’ve come to call it. There’s nothing artificial about the intelligence. It’s very, very real.

Not simply a machine that gives me answers, but something to think against. Machine thinking meeting human intellect.

So, will A.I. kill the creative star?

When I originally asked that question, I thought the threat would come from the machine. I’m less sure now. AI can already make things. It’s going to get much better at making things and we’re all going to get much better at making things with it.

The question is what happens when the novelty wears off and machine assistance becomes completely ordinary. Perhaps we’ll settle for an endless supply of perfectly competent, instantly generated stuff. Perhaps we’ll decide good enough really is good enough.

Maybe creativity becomes less about the ability to make something and more about having the judgement, curiosity and bloody-mindedness to make something worth noticing. Something worthy of admiration.

Something laudable.

So I think I’d ask my old question differently now.

It’s not whether AI will kill the creative star. It’s whether humans will be bothered enough about creativity to care if it does.

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From the original on Substack.