The Value of Creativity (Essay) (Patreon)

I've been working on the novel, but just haven't gotten the next chapter revised yet. I do though have an essay I wrote this month to share. This I plan to post online in a few days.

How much is an idea worth? Is the idea itself or the process of making that idea the most valuable part? There are a lot of facets to the ongoing debate about AI, but I want to talk about creativity and how I personally see it.

In my mind, ideas are cheap, not because they’re good or bad, but because they’re just ideas. They lack substance since they’ve not been executed yet. A good idea is valuable to me as a creator, but until it’s been drawn, written, or made, it’s just an idea. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone else. We often depict in media the aha moment of getting the idea as the most important part. Execution is not often shown. Watching someone sit there typing or drawing for hours at a time is not interesting. It’s work, and it takes time. And if you’re a company, you have to pay someone to do that for you.

Generative AI promises to cut out the boring parts out of the process while also saving it’s users time and money. That appeal will always be there for companies. I don’t see it going away, because the fact you tell the machine your idea and it does all the boring execution for you is appealing, especially when it’s much cheaper and faster than a person. The hours and hours of work put in by the people who create things aren’t interesting to business executives because they’re looking at the cost.

Business doesn’t value execution, it values results. The processes to get those results are beyond the scope of the people who are paying the bills. How the final product looks is what matters, and things that make it easier and cheaper to get those results are beneficial to the business. Even if those tools have scraped bits off the internet from hundreds of thousands of people, that’s an abstract problem that they only have to pay attention to if they want to. If those results are passable when compared to a human artist, but not great, that still has an economic appeal to them, especially for something used briefly and never used again.

In this world, the idea is what’s important, because the idea is what you give to the machine to create the thing you want. The process of using generative AI is just refining your prompt so the machine gets closer to what you desire. The execution is handled for you, and far faster and cheaper than you could ever achieve paying someone to do this for you, or you could do it yourself.

But is that what we want as creators? I’ve found the real work of being a writer is the part of refinement, not only in creating the first draft, but thinking how the various scenes I’ve written work together to tell the story. The core of my creative energy is recording the words and later refining them. When I used to throw pottery, something I did back in college, the way my hands shaped the clay was the core of the process, controlling the shape. I could not move on to the firing and glazing of the piece until I had extruded or built it in some way. When I’ve taken the time to draw, the lines I draw are the core of the process, and my struggle to refine those lines is what has always made drawing a challenge for me.

Tools change though, and there’s nothing saying you cannot take traditional tools to the output of generative AI, but for the vast majority of people, the final selected output will be the end of the process. Refinement will come by modifying the prompt and hitting regenerate, possibly hundreds of times. The prompt is the idea, and how the machine does the work doesn’t matter. It handles the execution.

In this world, it’s impossible for someone who does care about their processes to compete against a machine. They will never be able to write or draw as fast as the computer. They will never be able to do a video shoot as fast or as easily as the generative AI can. And when they take their hard-created work to the masses, they will compete against all this near instantly created material. Individuals may value their execution and what it took to create the item, but business certainly won’t; not if the work of the machine is cheaper and has no legal ramifications associated with it.

And yet if the process has no value, why do so many creators feel shaken at the idea they could lose their ability to show to other people on social media the results of the time and energy they put into their books, drawings, and other creations? Because the value of creativity has always come from the process. Ideas are cheap, and you can always get an idea. You cannot always find the time and energy to execute one.

The process is what makes the idea real, and I as a writer, artist, or potter execute my intentions upon the media I’m working on. Whether that’s the shape of a sentence of the curve of a piece of pottery, I push to use the tools I’m working with. And if the lines don’t come out the way I want, I erase and start over. I learn to be better by seeing what works, and while I do get frustrated when my hands cannot do what I want, I wouldn’t trade those hands away for a machine to do the work for me. My ideas are valuable to me, but until I’ve executed them, they exist locked inside of myself. Even the process of deciding which ideas I execute, an internal debate with myself, is in itself a process that shapes the lines, clay, and words.

More than anything, I value the execution of my work, and I value the execution of other people’s work. Content without intentional execution is just noise, and noise is something I try to tune out.