The debate on AI and job loss misses the deeper impact: by automating creativity, we risk devaluing the very essence of human expression.
Something is missing in the debate about generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and creative workers losing their jobs. The current conversation reduces creative activity to content production: marketable output. But creativity is so much more. It’s our attempt to articulate what we feel inside, both intellectually and emotionally. Being creative means grappling with the mess we encounter in our lives and on this planet—and somehow coming to terms with it, both collectively and individually. A debate that suggests only jobs are lost when generative AI takes over misses the essence of what creativity entails.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. AI has its hype cycles, and so do the doom scenarios it spawns. A decade ago, when neural networks took off, they were seen as dreadful harbingers of impending mass unemployment. Now, in 2024, many European companies struggle not with mass lay-offs but with filling vacancies. Company bosses with tech Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) promise to “definitely look into” adopting AI in their firms. However, it rarely goes much further than that. For better or worse, economy-wide AI implementation lags behind expectations.
Was the job market doom just a false alarm? Not quite. In many sectors, AI is not a major concern so far. Most taxi drivers need not lose sleep yet over self-driving Waymo cars. In some sectors, though, AI does encroach on jobs, and creative roles are on the front line. Generative AI is already quite capable, and it’s improving daily.
Top-notch opera composers or painters with work in the Guggenheim may have nothing to fear. However, people who pay the rent by creating, say, illustrations for websites or jingles for radio ads are right to be nervous. Like many others who see their livelihoods under threat, it’s legitimate for them to protest and demand a debate about their future. And let’s not forget: today’s Grammy winners started out small, probably funding their first steps with run-of-the-mill creative work. Eliminate that, and you dry up the pipeline for tomorrow’s superstars as well.
That is the state of play in the “AI and creative work” debate in a very small nutshell. However, something has always felt wrong to me about it, and I think it is its narrowness. Framing the issue as one of job loss views creativity through the economistic lens of the company boss or consultant: content in exchange for money. If there’s a cheaper way to produce something that sells just as well, what’s not to like? Job types have always come and gone. Is it a bane that, at least in wealthy countries, no one ploughs fields by hand anymore? And from that perspective, is automated text writing any different from using a machine, rather than hands, to sort through rubbish in a recycling plant?
I think it is. Creativity is communication. People start playing music to connect with others, not to earn money. They craft lyrics to touch others, to soothe them, to express their anger, whatever. Just as people wield a paintbrush to project something onto the canvas that is still nestled somewhere between their heart and brain, they show others what they could not possibly articulate in words.
Creativity is also self-reflection. People used to write diaries to order their thoughts, to delve into their feelings, and to express them. It can be a cathartic experience, or simply a calming one. If you’ve tracked your life in a diary—as a teenager, perhaps?—you’re familiar with this moment: once you listen inwardly to write down what’s truly going on, things emerge that we would otherwise never articulate. Secret longings, frustrations at work, relationship troubles, fears. Diary writing is not about chronicling your life but about reflecting on it.
Self-expression, communication, and reflection help us navigate days, months, and years. If you walk around with open eyes, there is enough beauty, violence, existential questions, and agony out there to bewilder us. Whether you prefer Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or UK Grime, here are real people making music to translate their experiences into something that resonates with fellow human beings. Others use TikTok videos or novels as their medium of choice.
Long story short, creativity is a virtue that deserves nourishment (I borrow the virtue aspect from Shannon Vallor’s fantastic books on philosophy and technology). Creativity, even in small doses, can help us grow into better people, happier people, for ourselves and for each other. That’s why we should allow children to doodle and engage in handicrafts at school, and why a liberal arts education might encourage students to keep a diary. Even if you’re not a professional painter or writer of any kind, being creative is beneficial. It fosters empathy and forges connections with others, often on a visceral level—like sampling food that just tastes great, no explanation required. Creative expression can link people in the same way.
But this creativity is like a fragile plant. To blossom, it needs care, nutrients, and regular watering. Enter GenAI. Yes, algorithms are impressive at making hip-hop beats or wallpaper designs. However, the more we outsource creative work to algorithms, the more we allow creativity, as a faculty in our society, to shrivel. In theory, GenAI could be a tool to boost your creativity, producing even funkier creations (you’ll find quite a bit of that in contemporary art galleries these days).
But I bet that in practice, GenAI is mostly a quick fix to produce more content more cheaply and quickly, not a means to elevate artistic expression to a whole new level. It would be a shame if people stopped making pencil drawings because, by now, DALL-E is so much better. It would also be a shame if people stopped penning poems because now Meta’s Llama outperforms them.
I realise that even now, hobby poets are rare. But if anything, we should want more of them, not fewer. Cultural traditions and religions around the world prize self-reflection and artistic expression. Secular thinkers like Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes hoped that technological progress would eventually free us to devote more time to play and create.
There is no news here, but that’s not the world we live in in 2024, despite the abundance of new technology. We do find people in our societies who earn money through creative work—even if it is rarely substantial. They combine commercial work, such as magazine illustrations, with their non-commercial projects, like pictures they give to friends as gifts. Most musicians never break through on Spotify, getting by instead on guitar or clarinet lessons for children. There is a creative stratum in society, in short, that isn’t about artsy superstars but consists of people who keep alive the creative dimension of our human existence.
If these people were to lose their livelihoods, not only would their jobs disappear. The musical education for our children would also vanish, along with the creative classes at community schools, the art classes at colleges, and the entire notion that investing time in honing creative faculties is worthwhile. Algorithmic “content production” would, de facto, if not intentionally, devalue creativity in its entirety.
And that would be a loss for all of us. Open a newspaper or your social media feed, and you find discord all around—frequently in the form of deadly violence on small and large scales. This world could use all the healing it can get. And creative faculties could help. So, automating our creative side away would come with collateral damage far beyond some lost employment down the line.
Compare that to the message of the recent Draghi Report. The ex-ECB boss’s message to the EU was: invest and compete, or die. Digital technologies, with AI central among them, are key domains that Draghi believes need boosting. Put on narrow economistic glasses, and you can see his point. People do need jobs and cash to buy food and pay the rent. But a thriving society is not just a web of economic nodes that shuffle money and products around. So when we debate GenAI and creative activity, it is at our own peril that we sever the economic side from the rest of our existence. It is not just jobs that are at risk.
Daniel Mügge is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). As leader of the NWO Vici project RegulAite, he investigates how the EU governs artificial intelligence and how these politics are shaped by global geopolitical and economic competition. At UvA, he is also co-founder of the research platform and the research priority area AI & Politics.