Artificial Intelligence is redefining creativity

The panic around Artificial Intelligence is not going away anytime soon. While the initial excitement seems to have waned, concerns around job losses, ethical considerations, and implications on education continue to be discussed.
A larger concern that has still not been sufficiently addressed is the impact of AI on human creativity, or even the creative industries today.
If a novel has been written, or partially written by AI, is it even a novel? Would anyone read it? Would AI provide insights not available to humans?
The answers are not as simple as they seem. Instinctively, one draws back upon hearing about AI-driven artistic work. As researchers have observed, AI can only produce and re-produce what it already has as data, but humans can think beyond the data.
Whether it is composing music, a poem, or an artistic piece of work, human rely on their inspiration, the creative process, and their own lived experience. None of this can be duplicated by existing data.
Today, when chatbots can create incredible content, including art and music, traditional definitions of creativity are being challenged.
In some ways, it is not difficult to imagine how AI could create artistic content. Large models analyse existing data to discern patterns and make predictions of how an individual artist could create a new piece of work by mirroring existing forms.
This makes many of us uneasy as we are used to thousands of years of civilisational knowledge being produced with original, human thought.
However hard we may try to resist, AI is here to stay. In fact, studies have shown that people who were actually curious but cautious about AI actually engage more deeply with it, critiquing and adapting it for their specific goals and ends. Skeptics, on the other hand, disengaged completely, leading to them being shut off from new possibilities in their field. Interestingly, those who were willing to involve AI in their creative processes actually showed minimal changes to their original work, asserting the value of human intervention.
AI is not just augmenting creativity but reshaping the way that we understand art in any form. The value of any composition may soon be re-interpreted, based on how effectively it captures human emotions with technical prowess.
For artists themselves, using AI may help to generate ideas, have an impartial critic, and help in the later processes of disseminating and marketing their work.
In fact, research over the last couple of years has shown that those involved in creative industries, including visual artists, film-makers and writers, have come to see AI as co-creators. Unlike scientists who may use AI to generate data, creators use it to explore possibilities and develop an idea.
Humans bring emotional depth and a cultural context to their art. This is the core of creativity. AI may never replace this and hence cannot create a work from scratch.
What we are seeing today is a re-definition of creativity, with humans and machines engaging in collaboration to innovate and create new forms of art and storytelling. Whether such forms will win our hearts and engage us remains to be seen.