Why AI will not Replace Creativity

Machines lack the imperfections that create beauty

There has been much discussion lately concerning whether the creative industries risk being replaced by Artificial Intelligence. I recently posted the following thought:

AI does not represent a threat to the creative industries. It will help with service-based jobs, end of story. No one wants AI art, AI movies, AI scripts, AI literature. If you believe AI will replace creativity, you don’t understand what it means to be human.

In response, Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary biologist, wrote:

Catastrophically naive. If you don't think AI threatens people in creative industries, you don't understand AI, or markets, or careers, or culture.

On the contrary, I believe AI can unleash humanity’s creative potential.

Where AI cannot replace human work is ingenuity. The argument is teleological: machines were designed by humans; therefore, how can those machines design something humans have not ordered them to do themselves? Machines cannot develop the original design without being told what to do. They lack the capacity for invention.

One of the main arguments in defense of AI threatening the creative industries is simple: machines are more efficient than humans. In this regard, AI defenders are correct. Machines offer in a few seconds what humans may take hours, days, weeks, years, or even decades to accomplish. They’re also precise in ways that humans cannot hope to be. They’re more efficient and accurate performers. You can tell AI to create any image by following the traces of famous painting masters of the past, for example. It will do so instantly.

However, even the best argument in defense of AI’s efficiency and precision falls short.

Compare an AI-generated image to a handmade, original painting by Caravaggio. One was made in a few seconds, the other through dozens of hours, effort, obsession, even sweat, tears, and blood (Caravaggio was infamously accused of murder and was often living as a fugitive, escaping persecution for his crime). At a gut level, does the AI-created art feel as full of life as a Caravaggio painting? Perhaps we can’t put our finger on why, but it’s clear to anyone who observes closely the different feeling the painting by Caravaggio evokes. Emotions transpire through work that tells a story. Reason cannot always articulate the sensation we feel when we observe a great original painting—it speaks to our most primitive understanding of what it means to be human, and, at the same time, it speaks to our ability to try and reach a glimpse of the divine through our work.

We can observe this reality in therapeutic developments, too. Some people claim that “trauma-dumping” ChatGPT with your life story offers a more insightful analysis of your psyche than a licensed therapist. Likewise, many are starting to use AI to help them manage relationships more effectively. AI is capable of offering us human insight.

Reaching out to AI for life advice can be undoubtedly soothing because it is designed to generate positivity, avoiding the criticisms and imperfections that make individuals so uniquely human and, sometimes, so unbearable to us. Still, the chatbot can help you manage those relationships, but not replace them. AI may give you advice free from judgment or awkwardness, but a friend will give you the warmth and connection a machine lacks—the same way an object made by our fellow humans carries that sensation through their creation, and its imperfections only add value to the work of art. Humans desire that same connection, even to the simplest objects around us.

A similar panic occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, automated processes could mass-produce and manufacture goods in enormous quantities. This development saved time and resources. The items produced were identical in both appearance and function in a way that humans could not replicate with the same expediency and detail. It also made them cheaper, and it made us, in many ways, materially richer.

The Luddites were concerned with how machines would replace their labor. However, the value of artisanship only increased during the Industrial Revolution because it became rarer. Demand was higher, and supply was lower, making prices skyrocket and artisans more prosperous. Only the elite classes could afford handmade goods when they were once the norm for every economic class of society. A valuable criticism of the rise of industry and technology is the lowering of the quality of goods for the masses. Quality has been sacrificed at the altar of quantity.

But this is beside the argument being made about AI replacing creativity. Why would elites spend more on handmade goods in the first place? Why is high fashion comprised entirely of handcrafted products, and it is precisely the fact that they are handmade, that they possess imperfections created by humans through struggle, that makes them more valuable, more beautiful? These imperfections are so revered that when you buy high-fashion items, it states, “Imperfections on this product are testament to its uniqueness as a handcraft.”

The error in the idea that AI will replace art lies in the belief that humans desire perfection more than authenticity. Machines are superior to humans in skill, yet skill does not contain the ingenuity of creation or the authenticity of thought. Skill is execution: it is machine-like. There are painters with excellent skill but no invention and, furthermore, no passion in creation. Likewise, there are painters with inferior skill but a genius invention, and their work can elicit feelings in their spectators because it reflects the intensity of their emotions. This is what distinguishes a painter from an artist. Likewise, it is what distinguishes a machine from a human.

What makes us human is technique, not skill. Here’s the difference explained. I once completed a workshop with a painter named Vincent Desiderio, who said skill isn’t impressive, but technique is. Technique is what distinguishes us. Technique has a soul, it involves striving and failing, a character that is uniquely human, exclusive to every individual, and that we can relate to as spectators of great art, that we feel in our bones. When we see it, we instinctively appreciate it. Technique can only be copied, but it cannot be created.

This is why an imperfect painting made by a human is superior to a perfect painting made by a machine. The former is irreplaceable, the latter is not.

The greatest Renaissance figurative artists had a unique style that distinguished them from other painters. Their creations were beautifully flawed because they did not aspire for perfection; they aspired to evoke humanity in its superior form, one that exalted the divine in us, a divinity that has created us as imperfect.

AI can make life easier for us. The Industrial Revolution replaced much of our manufacturing labor, including the most tedious kind, but AI can bring us a step further by replacing even service-based labor. It can provide us with the most practical advice, going so far as potentially replacing specific industries like medicine as we know it. But even the practice of surgeon is that of an artist. Would you trust a machine more than a surgeon to lay its hands on you, to cut your flesh open? For all the imperfections a surgeon carries because of our humanity, it is precisely those imperfections, paradoxically, that allows that surgeon to see yours in their complexity and fix them.

AI can allow us to become geniuses in our own right, using our talents as God intended. As all our repetitive labor might be replaced, we may become free to all become poets, artists, painters, designers, novelists and philosophers, because these are the modes of being no machine will be able to replace. That is because we live, while machines merely exist.

Nature makes us feel connected to the divine because God created the natural world, in the same way handmade creations make us feel connected to other humans because humans made them. Just as humans cannot replicate Godly inventions, machines cannot compete with human creations.

Alessandra Bocchi is the founder of Alata Magazine and Rivista Alata.

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