Year of Creativity – Part Deux

In my head, I’m calling the “Year of Creativity” my third act.

First Act: Humor and Journalism

This is from when I graduated college in 1994 through when I left IMDb in 2005. It was writing humorous essays, The WASHED-UPdate™, and going on to become IMDb’s first “Senior Editor.” While I had a background in tech from being a computer nerd in my teens, I was focused on being a writer and tech was just a tool. But as I got tired of waiting for programmers to make the tech tools I needed, I started brushing the rust off my programming skills from the 80s and learning modern programming languages.

Second Act: Blending Writing & Dev

I spent more time learning to be a software developer and even had a couple of Microsoft contracts with “Developer” or “SDE” (Software Development Engineer) in them. Then found my way into Developer Relations, which encompasses tech writing, advocacy, and evangelism.I’m currently still in this second act, working as a technical marketing content writer, creating different kinds of written content, sample code, and advice for a developer and technical leadership audience.

Third Act: Call me an artist

Over the next 5-10 years, I’m trying to build the foundations to focus on art… written, visual, and auditory. That means comics, films, novels, and songs.

That may seem like a stupid choice with generative AI poised to “replace” artists. But I don’t consider it a replacement.

Technology has been shifting labor markets for centuries. Scribes were put out of work when Gutenberg started the moveable type revolution in the west. Typists were put out of work by copiers and word processors. Improving levels of automated speech recognition are putting court reporters and stenographers out of work. Cameras put illustrators out of work. Still somehow the world survived and artists found new ways to put those technologies to work.

Sure, there will be more shitty content created by AIs and people with little talent, making it harder for human creators to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. But people who leverage AI to make themselves more productive and to extend their talents into new creative métiers will find that they can build an audience.

The internet started eating into the revenues of newspapers and television networks. YouTubers and TikTokkers and bloggers were able to make end runs around the traditional moneyed gatekeepers. And while some of the new moneyed gatekeepers are building or buying some of the best tools, there’s still a great open source community building around democratizing generative AI.

It’s harder and takes more training/experimentation to make something awesome with Stable Diffusion (open source) vs. MidJourney or Dall•E, but it’s possible. And as home computing gets stronger, the ability to train and run open source on your home laptop or desktop will lower the barriers to entry.

Does this mean the people who learned to create art with paper and canvas will be left out in the cold? No, but it means they’ll need to adapt. There will always be a market for handmade art. It may even command a premium among those who like to brag they can afford artisan art.

When I was coming out of college, the opening of the internet to the general public was barely beginning to upend the traditional publishing industry of books, magazines, and newspapers. I started blogging before Jason Calcanis coined the term. Tons of companies employ writers because they need content for their web sites, content marketing, newsletters, etc. I’d say the number of people making their living as writers is bigger now than when I graduated college, even accounting for population growth.

The internet democratized publishing. Anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and some piddling amount for hosting could start a blog and some of those grew to become brands that employed hundreds or thousands.

Yes, there will be consumers and producers who settle for the crap pumped out by AI at the behest of people with minimal effort and talent, but the people who can figure out how to leverage AI to produce stuff that excites and engages with originality will be the new artists. Meanwhile the studios will gladly pump out “Cars 18” for a net production cost of $200k and parents looking for something, anything to shut their toddlers up over Christmas break will provide the audience.

There are two truths to remember:

1. Change is constant.
2. Just because you learned a trade doesn’t give you a guarantee you’ll be able to make a living at it your entire life.

We’ll find out in the next few years as Congress and the Supreme Court enact legislation and rule on cases about the rights of an artist to a style that’s associated with their name, to their likeness, to their voice. There will be a patchwork of state laws (New York and California have usually been at the forefront of state-level artists’ rights laws), but even if they can get their personal work exempted from training data, the plethora of public domain work will still provide a solid basis for generative AI.

Remember that there’s a ton of art (photos, paintings, novels, journalism, and music) in the public domain and it’s not all hundreds of years old. Most of the work produced with tax dollars by government agencies is placed in the public domain. This famed Dorothea Lange photo is public domain because she took it on assignment by the Farm Security Administration. A huge collection of her work is available through the Library of Congress.

I’ve donated work to the Open Clipart Library, both stuff I’ve made and stuff I extracted from government produced publications. There’s millions more photos, stock videos, and illustrations at sites like Pixabay. There’s a ton of software under permissive licenses like Apache and MIT.

Getting your work out of training data will not end the threat. It will just give you an illusion of protection. You’ll have to ask yourself “how much is my style/brand really worth,” because people who might prefer something in your style may be happy to settle for another if they’re saving 90% in production costs.

In the end, even if various artists create a speed bump for generative AI, it will simply be that… a momentary slowdown. The artists who learn to leverage AI will win in the end. This is not me being Nostradamus and peering into my crystal ball. This is me remembering Santayana from history classes: “those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”

The lesson here is that change is inevitable and labor trends shift as technologies propagate. I’m choosing to embrace the new technologies and see where they can take me. At 27, I launched a blog that helped jump start my career in tech. At 55, I’m launching a “Year of Creativity” and we’ll see where that leads.

Wish me luck… or not.