Why The Creative Economy Shouldn't Fear Generative A.I.

Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI's new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years--an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public. Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions. And, for the first time, such predictions didn't seem abstract. When an A.I. bot like ChatGPT can write a coherent story or essay in seconds, and visual applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, produce similarly comprehensible images you have to wonder if human creativity--slow and often uncertain--might be superfluous.