Hype vs. Creativity

Will AI ever replace human creativity?

The hype around AI in pop culture is hard to ignore; in fact, humans and machines have officially updated their status from It’s Complicated to In a Relationship. We’re more connected than ever before and AI has already helped write pop songs, copied the styles of great painters, and influenced how films are made. But the question remains: can AI ever replace human creativity?

Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence.

The truth is that there is not a right answer in creativity – the very beauty of creativity is that its subjective, complex, and wildly personal! Creativity is a skill we usually consider uniquely human. And by their nature, computers are not creative. They process 0s and 1s and can help discover patterns that look creative. People often say that computers can only do what they are explicitly programmed to, therefore determining them to not be creative. However, with the rise of machine learning, AI can now actually learn certain creative skills.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

With this being said, AI can only be as good as its training, and won’t be able to do anything in areas other than the narrow domain it was trained for, whether this is music composition, film editing, or generating beautiful artworks. Experts also point out that teaching computers to be creative is inherently different from the way that humans learn to create with it being less about recreating the human mind and more about finding time-efficient and cost-effective ways to inspire human creativity.

Reducing the barrier to entry.

Dell EMC collaborates with organizations to unlock the value of their data with AI. We have seen some incredible results in the fields of music and film where production times have been slashed by weeks. Amper Music is one such innovative company who is enabling enterprise teams and independent artists to compose custom music in seconds using AI to quickly and effectively match the style, structure, and length of the desired track. Additionally, the film industry is using AI as an assistant, rather than completely replacing humans in the creative process, to help sift through hundreds of hours of video to select core pieces of footage to use in the final product.

Ultimately, it’s likely that AI will be best used to support people in coming up with new ideas on a much more regular basis than they do today. This will be especially beneficial to smaller, independent artists such as songwriters who can present full melodies alongside their lyrics or give filmmakers the tools to create an engaging trailer to support their funding pitch. Our goal is to help increase the collaboration between humans and machines.

Augmenting creativity.

So, while we think AI will never replace the human element of creativity, it can certainly offer many wonderful benefits by augmenting the creative process as a smart, efficient, and inspirational assistant and allowing artists to do what they do better by enhancing their skillset and substituting in artistic talents that they lack.

Learn more about Dell Technologies’ AI solutions here, or watch the full debate from SXSW 2019, below.

About the Author: Dell Technologies