Creativity’s Big Bang Moment

Don’t believe the doomsayers. Breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence are leading to a lot of hand wringing about massive job losses. In the media and entertainment business, it’s the artists that are most concerned. While cultural, safety and economic concerns are serious and deserve immediate attention, if history is any guide, we are about to see a massive explosion in creativity and the arts.

Fun fact from the annals of art history: When, in 1839, Louis Daguerre went public with his invention, the photographic process, it shocked, threatened and caused deep anxiety among artists around the world. Why would anyone pay a painter to painstakingly create a portrait, figure, or landscape when a camera could create perfect or near-perfect likeness? Surely painting as an art form was dead. But that’s not what happened, or at least not all that happened. Instead, the camera caused a fireball of creativity, changing forever the way art was conceived, developed, and understood.

Blast zones emerged in at least two areas. The first artists began asking the existential question, what should we paint? The result? Modern art, in its entirety, was born. Like the big bang, the first moments were concentrated in the hands of a few modernists, but in a blink, this spread out into multiple directions: Impressionism, expressionism, cubism, minimalism - “the full catastrophe,” as Zorba the Greek had it. Representational and narrative art was dead, at least for the moment, but epochal new art rose from its ashes. All because of a single big bang invention: the camera.

The other blast zone centered on the invention itself. Photography became its own art form.  Within a decade of Daguerre’s publication, in Paris alone, hundreds of thousands of photographic plates were sold. The camera attracted artists who did not have the technical skill to paint but suddenly had a tool for their creativity. Other artists that did have technical skill used photographs as reference and inspiration. Think about how impoverished Western cultural heritage would be without the likes of Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Capa.

A similar big bang moment is at work today. Generative AI can create illustrations in seconds that would otherwise have taken weeks. Artists that are conceptually minded and design oriented will ask the same question painters asked with the advent of the camera: What should we create? I can’t guess where this will take us - we are only in the early nanoseconds of the big bang - but great things are coming.

I wonder, will there be a Picasso that emerges from this big bang? There certainly could be. Like Picasso, I’m sure that new artist will court considerable initial disdain. Already art critics scorn the many illustrations produced by AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Like many traditional artists of the past, perhaps the greatness of these illustrations and works will be appreciated only when their creators are long gone.

Not everything generated by AI will be of stellar quality. In fact, most efforts surely will not be. These phenomena tend to follow a power law distribution pattern: A few giant hits and a very, very long tail of smaller efforts that, creative as they may be, will not attract a large following.

What excites me most of all is the possibility of millions of new creators trying their hand at art using brand new tools.  Like the camera, the technology will improve – this time exponentially -- and with it the artistic expression that takes advantage of this new artform. In the video game industry, where I invest and work, that possibility promises to upend and transform both the process and output media’s most dynamic and creative sector.

The original big bang must have been a wonder to behold. If you did not sit up in awe of the Webb telescope looking back some 13.5 billion years into the past, a mere 0.2 billion years after the birth of the universe, you weren’t paying attention. Anyone today paying attention to AI is filled with a similar sense of awe, inspiration and, dare I say, fear. We are present at creation. And it is breathtaking.

Ben Feder is Managing Partner at TIRTA, an investment firm focused on video games and related sectors. He can be reached at benfeder@tirta.io