AI will never replace creative jobs

AI is an abbreviation for the word “artificial intelligence,” which describes the branch of computer science that involves simulating intelligent human behavior. AI technology and utopian or dystopian visions of a future with AI are a frequent sight in the world of science fiction in the information age, popping up in video games to television to books. Despite its prevalence in our media, many are unaware that the science fiction we enjoy today is becoming our reality in the near future. The conflict of AI doesn’t just include philosophical dilemmas on the nature of humanity and robot civil rights, which is an issue that probably won’t arise until the far future. In fact, the far more pressing issue is that of robots becoming the dominate workers in our industries. That’s right, folks: the biggest threat to your blue collar jobs aren’t other people, but robots. And it doesn’t just stop at industrial jobs, either. According to data posted on Wired.com, 47% of US jobs could be automated in the next two decades. This includes everything from your local McDonald’s staff to your psychiatrist. This threat to human workers isn’t science fiction because we’ve seen this machine takeover before during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1800s roughly 80% of Americans worked on farms, but today it’s as low as 2%. With the threat of AI dominating our labor force, just what future careers are safe from the cold methodical hands of artificial intelligence? Despite the apocalyptic visions of some futurists, who depict humans becoming useless and inferior flesh creatures in the face of our inventions, there is a job market that can never be truly dominated by artificial intelligence. AI can never replace the humans who perform some of the most unappreciated and underpaid types of work today: art.

To begin with, art is a field that is often included in what is called the “humanities,” a word used to describe any study or work that deals with how people process and document the human experience. Since AI aren’t human, and therefore they can never have human experiences, they can’t properly create or enjoy art. For example, in 2016 a Japanese AI successfully wrote a short story and entered it in a competition, where it passed the first level. However, according to one of the novelists surrounding the competition named Satoshi Hase, “there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions.” According to the author of the article written on this event, Chloe Olewitz, “If AI bots can’t relate to humans, it will be hard for humans to relate to them. That may factor into the disappointing character development,” she explains. The most human part of the short story the AI wrote--the character descriptions--caused the AI to struggle, because robots simply cannot process what authentic humanity is. In short, since AIs aren’t human, they will inevitably struggle with jobs in the Humanities.

Besides, AI aren’t programmed, for the most part, to steal creative jobs. In fact, AI’s focus is on monotonous, mechanical, uncreative work that people are assigned to do. In Youtuber CGP Grey’s “Humans Need Not Apply” video, he mentions the evolution of the horse's roles in human history. From intensive farm labor to the cavalry, horses were valuable members of the labor force. And yet, we barely see them at work today. Now, horses are just pets; their role in society is confined to that of a luxury item. And while there aren’t nearly as many horses today as there were in 1915, they still exist wherever there are people willing to buy them. If developments in automation couldn’t eliminate the horse’s role in society, AI can’t eliminate the entire human labor force. In this situation, humans should be given jobs that expressly require humanity, which includes jobs in the artistic field. In Lawrence Lek’s video essay “Sinofuturism”, which describes Western stereotypes of the Chinese people and how to embrace (and, simultaneously, subvert them), he specifically addresses automation in a clip. This clip displays a Chinese factory that is replacing many of its human laborers with machines. The supervisor of the factory addresses the growing trend of unemployment that occurs with industrialization, and suggests that maybe people will pursue more challenging, people-oriented types of work that require the humanity no machine could possess. With the future of the labor force looking less and less human, humans can only fit where humanity is needed. Art, which requires an innate sense of what humans think, do, and feel, and has such a broad definition at times that is constantly being stretched, will be one of the only ways to contribute to society. In short, by AI taking over automated jobs, it may actually increase actual human’s involvement in more creative jobs and spur job growth in this area.

This idea that art has a broad, almost indefinable definition, refers to the modern art movement. This movement questions the very nature of art and what qualifies as such, and automation and by an extension AI, play important roles in the exploration of the field of art. Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-made” art rocked the world of traditional art by introducing the idea that seemingly ordinary manufactured objects could be considered as art--an extreme and blasphemous claim at the time. The Japanese AI that wrote the short story had to have programmers. Would the lab of programmers technically be artists because the bot they designed created art? “Art” is a label that can encompass many things, including the everyday objects that we own since they were designed by somebody. If art can include functional objects, and these objects are made to create art, why can’t the programmers of the AI that make art also be artists? Artists throughout history delegated a share of their work to others to get the job done; after all, in the Italian Renaissance, it was the apprentice’s job to assist the artist in order to learn the trade. The relationship between artist and apprentice, and programmer and AI are similar in that fashion. Andy Warhol, best known for founding the pop art movement, described his art philosophy and works to be both a critique and a celebration of pop culture and its mass-produced, marketable, and kitschy ways. AI itself fits all those descriptions. AI can be art. Therefore, just like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, AI programmers can be considered artists.

In CGP Grey’s video, he says that the human brain is just a complex machine, not a feat of magic, and that it can be simulated. He then demonstrates that a music-writing AI named Emily Howel was able to produce music that, when tested by a human audience, was unintelligible from human-produced music. While I understand that the human mind truly is nothing but a complex machine, CGP Grey forgets a few important facts. For one, CGP Grey underestimates the true cultural value of art. Art is present everywhere in society and with the Modern Art movement stretching the horizon of its definition, truly anything can be art if that is the intention for which it was created or repurposed. As I said in my previous point, art that is created by the AI must be understood to be art-making-art, and the programmer is the true artist in this scenario. Therefore, the bot Emily Howel would not be an artist, but rather, her programmer(s) should be given that credit for creating a piece of artwork that is able to create art itself. Yes, the human brain is not magically different than a computer, but people are people and robots are robots, and technology has yet to create a machine complex enough to earn personhood. Therefore the title of “artist” and the ownership of whatever artworks are made by the bot are given to the programmer(s), not the bot, who only aided the programmer. This means that since robots lack personhood and genuine human intelligence, they lack the ability to truly make intellectually creative works by themselves, so jobs that require intellectual creativity cannot be done by AI.

So, despite the grim predictions of these futurists, no matter what, AI can never replace humans in the creative field. It is the nature of of AI to be artificial, and thus it is their nature to lack true humanity. All the jobs projected to be replaced en masse in the near future by AI are jobs that humans find to be boring or unnecessarily strenuous and unengaging. And besides; if AI were to write songs, stories, and paint, wouldn’t that make their programmer the true artist behind it all? The modern art movement seeks to answer the question, “what is art?” I believe art’s true purpose is to depict all facets of humanity, so anything that fits this description, is art. Our humanity encompasses many things, including creativity. To craft AI in our own image, to teach it to create, the AI also becomes the art in the process.