Last week I came across Scott Belsky’s article “Creativity is the new productivity” I skimmed it, running to catch the bus, and immediately thought, this is awesome! Here I am enrolled in a design program, teaching us to be creative; the future is bright.
After actually diving into the article, and stewing on it, I realized something wasn’t adding up for me. I agreed with Belsky’s overall premise, but “The Implications of The Creativity Area” completely fell flat, and were in direct opposition to one of my favorite theorist, Toby Shorin’s The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics.
To back up a moment, Belsky suggests that we crossed “the ‘Productivity-Creativity Inversion’ — where machines (algorithms, robots, etc.) have become a better investment for future productivity gains than humans.” As a result, productivity is commoditized and copious, thus driving up the value of relatively scarce ‘creativity.’
I’m all in up until Belsky dives into “Implications of The Era of Creativity.” Here, he posits that this new era will benefit from distribution, attribution, aggregation, and everyone is now a creator (as a result of cheap, accessible tools). However, these potential upsides perfectly align with Shorin’s logic behind the disruption of aesthetics.
“Cheap to produce, free to distribute, yet still impossible to meaningfully automate, aesthetic production is an increasingly precarious vocation. The status associated with aesthetic novelty is eroding, and novelty itself has become difficult to eke out of a system in which everything is visible, accessible, and relativized. The graphic design profession is being strangled in a race to the bottom of the market, and the distributed network topology of the internet is largely responsible; aesthetics has, simply put, been disrupted.
Usually disruptions create new markets, which generate enormous wealth and value. In the case of aesthetics, much of this value has been soaked up by the existing infrastructure providers: PC manufacturers (hardware), Adobe, (software), advertising networks and aggregators (distribution). We do see vast growth in the number of boutique agencies, design studios, and so on. But as I have argued, the forces of technology that have created these markets are simultaneously destroying the monetizable value of the entire cultural category.”
Toby Shorin
(I won’t dare try and condense and summarize The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics, for fear of butchering Shorin’s argument and nuance, and instead urge any designer, artist, creative, or cultural producer to read it. )
In essence, the creativity that Belsky believes we will gain from the AI revolution has already been demonetized, and the benefits will flow not to the creative individuals, but instead to the platforms, networks, and tools which serve as the backbone for creativity in the first place.
Where do we go from here? How are we, the designers and creatives, supposed to see this new frontier?
Maybe we should focus more on humans, on empathy, on observations; places where, for now, the machines aren’t as adept.
