Will AI Make People Reliant, Lazy, and Create a Drop in Cultural Standards or Inspire Innovation, Creativity, and New High-Quality Cultural Contributions?

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by
Elizabeth Ann Roy

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The Two Sides of AI -- Illustration by ChatGPT

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I made this post on LinkedIn in response to a post in this discussion  and decided to repost it on the Home Arts Content and Copywriting blog. The discussion started with a post about a company claiming that customers could use their AI to create a brand identity. The original poster, Andy Sharpe, creates brand identities for businesses. He argued that what the company posted as an example of a brand AI had created was low in quality and didn't create a unique brand identity. I agreed with that.

However, he went on to argue that people who use AI will automatically become lazy, rely on whatever initial output AI produces, and accept that output as good enough. From that premise, he predicts an overall lowering of cultural standards. 

In my opinion, this further argument proceeds from a false premise. Some may use AI lazily, but I argued that some will use it to expand creativity and possibly produce totally new types of art. It depends on the individual. The discussion went on from this post, but here's my initial post.

"Human-made" versus mass-produced is already a luxury in certain industries, such as art or the human-made, hand-made items on Etsy. In cases like that, human-made brands become judged on quality and creativity. The better the quality and the higher the creativity, the higher the value and perceived worth. The higher the value and the perceived worth, the more consumers will be willing to pay.

Now, I do think that some will be willing to invest creativity and time into revising AI prompts to create higher-quality creations. Who knows what someone like that could be able to create. We could have a whole new field of immersive art with accompanying musical compositions and poetry, stories, or meditations. We could have immersive movies.

On the other hand, others will use AI for run-of-the-mill, mass-produced products.

We currently have mass-produced clothes and designer fashions. There's room for both. I don't see AI negating the need for creativity. I see it becoming an inspiration for creative people to expand their vision and creativity.
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What concerns me is what I've been reading recently about people becoming lazy as they turn to the use of AI and losing cognitive skills like creativity or critical thinking. I suppose, at least since the Industrial Revolution, there have been mass producers and hand-made creators.

On the other hand, if we keep moving to an emphasis on work-life balance and encourage adults to engage in activities outside of and even unrelated to their work, like learning to play a musical instrument, taking up some form of art, learning a language, studying philosophy or some other subject from Coursera or Udemy, that could counteract that tendency. I mean, kids are encouraged to engage in extracurricular activities. Parents drive them to those activities. So why not encourage parents and other adults to do the same?

In a later post, I made the point that AI also can be a source of education. If you ask it for information on a topic, you also need to tell it to only use reputable sources, to tell you if it can't find an answer, to not create an answer itself if it can't find an answer, and to include the sources it used for its answer.