Will creative work survive AI?

What AI imperils is not human creativity itself but the ability to make a living from creative endeavour

- Caitlin Petre and Julia Ticona

I"t's a perilous moment for creative life in America. While supporting oneself as an artist has never been easy, the power of generative Al is pushing creative workers to confront an uncomfortable question: Is there a place for paid creative work within late capitalism? And what will happen to our cultural landscape if the answer turns out to be no?

As sociologists who study the relationship between technology and society, we've spent the last year posing questions to creative workers about AI. We've talked to book authors, screenwriters, voice actors and visual artists. We've interviewed labour leaders, lawyers and technologists. Our takeaway from these conversations: What AI imperils is not human creativity itself but the ability to make a living from creative endeavour.

The threat is monumental but the outcome is not inevitable. The actions that artists, audiences and regulators take in the next few years will shape the future of the arts for a long time to come.

In a short span of time, Al-generated content has become ubiquitous. Prose written in Al's unmistakably tedious style is pervasive, while in recent months, newer tools like Sora 2 and Suno have filled the internet with hit country songs and squishy mochi-ball cats.

The question that often surrounds the introduction of a generative Al model is whether or not it's capable of producing art at a level that competes with humans. But the creative workers we spoke with were largely uninterested in this benchmark. If AI can produce work that's comparable to that of humans, they felt, that's only because it stole from them.

Karla Ortiz, an illustrator, painter and concept artist, described the moment she witnessed AI churning out art in her style. "It felt like a gut punch," she said. "They were using my reputation, the work that I trained for decades, my whole life to do, and they were just using it to provide their clients with imagery that tries to mimic me."