AI Creativity Vs. Human Creativity - A Complete Guide For Artists, Creatives, And AI Enthusiasts

The term "AI Art" has been looked up 10 million times in 2023. from excitement in the tech community to paranoia among full-time artists, AI has "inspired" conflicting emotions among humans. But AI's development and its products are "inspired" by human engineering and prompts.

Human creativity is more open, spontaneous, and culturally relevant, while Artificial creativity is quicker and more scalable. AI creativity learns from the human creative output, while human creativity can leverage AI creativity for self-expression.

This article is the most comprehensive resource on human creativity and artificial creativity. It cites case studies and academic findings to illustrate the pros and cons of human and AI creativity. It also covers how the two are likely to co-exist in the future. Whether you're a writer, artist, or someone with a wild imagination but no technical training in artistic self-expression, this resource is helpful.

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AI Creativity: A Brief Overview

AI creativity is the creative capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Large Language Models (LLM) to produce an output that would not be possible without inspiration or thought. However, AI Generated Content (AIGC) is highly dependent on its dataset and an external prompt.

Many creatives, therefore, dismiss the idea of AI creativity because it relies on input. But if you observe any context of human artistic output, you can also trace it back to an external prompt. 

Beyonce's video album, Lemonade, is one of the most creative music projects in recent memory. It was inspired by her heartbreak over finding out that her husband, Jay-Z, was cheating on her.

Does that mean that Beyonce isn't creative because her inspiration was external? Not at all. Similarly, AI receiving "inspiration" from a human doesn't make it less creative. It just makes its inspiration more tangible.

Where humans work with intangible inspiration and follow a predictable process to create art, AI does the opposite. You can get as technical as possible with your prompts but don't know what the output will look like until it is displayed. This flipping of the creative process has its advantages and disadvantages.

The Pros Of AI Creativity

The advantages of AI creativity come from its ability to generate a higher volume of creative output in a lower time. These umbrella advantages manifest in the following technical form.

AI Can Master Technical Skills Quicker

Regarding the post-inspiration creative process, AI outperforms humans in specific domains. When both are given the same brief, ChatGPT can produce a much larger output than a human writer.

Similarly, AI art generators can produce art in more styles than individual human artists. This process pace superiority can allow AI to produce more art/creative work in many more formats than humans. For this, AI has machine learning to thank. Where humans' speed of learning is limited by biology, AI's learning speed is accelerated by technology.

AI Has Access To More Data

Machine learning is used to create specific AI products. AI models can learn a lot more and a lot quicker than a human can. While a human brain has over 2 million times the memory space of 2020s AI models and 1 million times more parameters, it is limited by homeostasis.

The self-regulation that keeps humans from exerting more energy than is required can also limit their memory. AI doesn't have this "use it or lose it" tendency. The invention of smartphones might make you bad at recalling phone numbers. 

But that type of optimization doesn't happen in Large Language Models. Because of this, AI models can retain more usable data for longer periods.

AI Isn't Slowed Down By Self-Doubt

People might be slower at basic math, not just because they have access to calculators. They might not be as quick at it as they were in their school days simply because they don't get as much regular practice.

That means they should be quicker in producing creative work they regularly engage in, right? Not really. Humans are slowed by self-doubt and expectations of perfection. AI isn't a perfectionist or an entity that worries about how its output will be judged. This helps it produce more art/creative output.

AI's Creativity Has A Surprise Element

When you create a piece of art by hand, there's satisfaction in concluding the process. However, there's no surprise. Collectors get a surprise after commissioning a piece, but the creator is robbed of that experience because of being involved in the process.

With creative AI tools, your ideas can come to life without your involvement in the technical process. You cannot predict what you'll get except that it will tangentially follow your prompt, so you can be pleasantly surprised by your creation.

AI's Creativity Can Expand Global Creative Potential

Many people do not have access to formal art training or enough time to turn their ideas into art. With increasingly accessible AI tools like Realm.ai, more people can turn their ideas into art.

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The Cons Of AI Creativity

AI creativity's advantages make it a formidable addition to multiple fields, including writing, art, and music production. However, it is unable to replace human art because of a few key disadvantages.

AI Creativity Is Less Therapeutic

If you take your time making art, it might not be because you're slowed down by the process. It might simply be because you enjoy the process. When the process is the reward, delegating it to anything or anyone else defeats the purpose of making art.

For fans of abstract art, a major part of what makes the end product enjoyable is the transfer of emotions from the process. Chaotic paint splatters invoke a feeling of chaos and uncertainty in the sensitive observer. Machines are capable of mimicking the end product but not feeling what an artist felt while making it.

If the process is the reward for you, then eliminating AI from your roster or making a more technical workflow for your AI art can help you. But if all you want is to express yourself with the help of AI, then easy-to-use apps like Realm.ai can help you turn your words into images. So the process-alienation drawback is contextually limited to people who enjoy the process of making art.

AI Creativity Is Devoid Of Experience

AI's creative output is data-driven and not experience-driven. It is not possible for AI to have meaningful experiences. Some might argue that it makes it impossible for AI to make meaningful art. There are ways to load your prompts with meaning. Banksy's art can be created with AI.

As long as there's meaning in the prompt, there can be meaning in the art. An artist who wants to paint a soldier giving a flower to a little girl as a pro-peace artwork can make an equally meaningful expression with a relevant prompt to mid-journey or Realm.ai.

Still, nuanced meaning is harder to embed in AI art. You can level up your selfies or produce "what if" scenarios with AI creativity. But when it comes to meaningful art, you can only make on-the-nose statements with AI.

AI Creativity Is Not Limitation-Driven

The saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention," perfectly sums up how human "weaknesses" can level up human creativity. AI doesn't have the same technical limitations as humans. Artist Henri Matisse was ill and unable to engage in his standard artistic workflow.

Because of his inability to produce art in his standard fashion, he came up with the idea of creating collages of cutouts. His work, The Snail, is pretty attention-grabbing and would not be possible without a technical limit.

As mentioned earlier, AI art generators have superior technical capabilities compared to humans. As a result, they cannot abandon ideas/prompts, morph their work mid-process, and come up with new workflows to reach a specific end result.

Human Creativity: A Brief Overview

Human creativity is a powerful phenomenon that has brought our species from the stone age to the current state of the world. As the world today reflects, it is not entirely positive, especially when mixed with human flaws, greed, and self-interest.

It gave us the lightbulb, which is often used to illustrate ideas. However, human creativity also gave us tools for violence and systems of exploitation. And that's what bothers people about artificial creativity. If human creativity has a dark side, AI creativity could have one as well.

But if you analyze how human creativity differs from artificial creativity, you can see that fears of AI turning against us are largely exaggerated. Human creativity stems from personal experience and external stimuli. Trauma, self-esteem, and social feedback are all parts of the abstract "prompt" process called inspiration.

Unlike AI, humans can admire, despise, fear, and celebrate events, phenomena, and narratives. Humans can also be conflicted about things, which can lead to interesting creative output.

Finally, the human creative process can entail reflection, making it perpetually ongoing. A creative mind has no beginning or end. It never shuts off and is always taking in information and coloring it with judgments to produce the next spark. That''s why, despite the spike in AIGC, human creativity remains essential and irreplaceable.

The Pros Of Human Creativity

What makes human creativity perpetually relevant is that it is personal and open-ended. These core advantages manifest in several specific ones that are, at least currently, absent from AI creativity. Below are the main advantages of human creativity.

Human Creativity Overcomes Limitations

Almost everything experienced by humans is finite. As a result, there are limits and constraints on every domain of the human experience. No one remains perpetually happy or sad. And no one has infinite resources either. Human creativity overcomes limitations and can sometimes turn constraints into assets.

An aspiring rapper who writes and rhymes about his struggles turns his disadvantage into an advantage through creativity. Guerilla marketing and growth hacking are creative fields of business promotion and expansion that is 100% driven by limitations.

If all marketing directors relied on AI LLMs to create their marketing plans, there would be no new methods of promotion.

Human Creativity Is Spontaneous And Open-Ended

AI creativity is so strictly bound by tangible prompts that it lacks the open-endedness associated with creatives. No matter how many suits and ties you bury a creative mind in, it remains open. When Arthur Fry was working as the resident product inventor/scientist at 3M, he was trying to formulate an adhesive.

Repeated failures due to the lack of his samples' stickiness eventually led to a surprise invention. Fry noticed that some of the loose sheets in his lab were stuck together. He tried to pull them apart and realized that no sheet was damaged. 

This "reversible" adhesive became a key ingredient in one of 3M's most popular stationery products: the Post-It note. Artificial creativity in its current state is incapable of changing its brief.

It Is In Touch With The Zeitgeist

Products of human creativity resonate with people. Practical products like WiFi routers and handbags can be used by people. And artistic products can be admired and felt by them. The need of the hour isn't something that can be put into a short tangible prompt. It requires a nuanced understanding of the social climate.

The human brain has over 100 trillion neural connections, whereas the most advanced AI models currently available to the public have been trained on less than 1 trillion parameters.

AI would need to become at least 100 times more complex in its learning and have as much real-time access to information to produce culturally relevant output without human intervention. Currently, only human creativity is capable of producing products and art of cultural consequence. Even "AI art" requires human creativity to serve as inspiration.

Its Products Are Unique

Human creativity, when wrapped in human experience, leads to relatively unique products. Of course, with billions of humans out there, creative products can often overlap. For instance, a lot of pop music might sound stylistically similar. But the similarity in human art is not even close to the extent of stylistic overlap in AI art.

Since AI's technical process of producing creative output is similar, it produces very few pieces that look similar. In the text domain, AI creativity can mimic the styles of different authors, but it fails to produce a unique voice.

Human Creativity Has Meta Capabilities

Products of Artificial creativity are not as unique by default as those of human creativity, but that does not make creative AI tools irrelevant. That's because human creativity can leverage creativity. In a meta-creative structure, one person's idea can be promoted by another person's creative idea.

A novelist's creative output is illustrated by another creative. The final book is marketed by yet another creative. Since creativity itself can be used creatively by humans, Artificial creativity doesn't cancel out human creativity. Humans can use AI creative engines and platforms like realm.ai to boost their own creative potential.

They can overcome technical limits that keep them from considering creative ideas. In the absence of AI tools, technical limits can be a major liability that can cancel out human creativity.

The Cons Of Human Creativity

Humans are flawed, so it is impossible for their creativity to be perfect. In some ways, this is what makes the creative phenomenon so remarkable. Its unpredictability is what makes life interesting and opens up doors that innovators can't foresee and account for. But creativity's openness to serendipity also comes with certain drawbacks.

Limited By Technical Capabilities

Human creativity is limited to what a human can technically do. When a writer can't illustrate his book, another human has to be able to technically illustrate it for an illustrated storybook to come into existence. In the absence of animators, a scriptwriter cannot produce an animated movie.

Similarly, in the absence of writing devices and word processors, a writer cannot write long passages of text. Fortunately, humans have come a long way and are able to do a lot more with modern tools. But many physical limitations can limit human output, which brings us to the second point.

It Is Slower To Scale

Human creative output cannot be scaled as easily as that of AI. Because humans are limited by their physicality, there are constraints around their material output. Even with keyboards, people have yet to exceed a 216 wpm (words per minute) output.

AI creativity isn't limited by the speed of finger movement or the physical motion of brushstrokes. Human creativity can also get repetitive after a while, requiring people to take breaks. On the other hand, AI creativity is open to constant regeneration.

Humans Can Have Creative Blocks

AI creativity also outperforms human creativity when it comes to guaranteeing deliverables. People can miss deadlines because of procrastination or creative blocks. Some creatives can suffer from executive dysfunction. Artificial creativity might not always produce deliverables, but it does create something. In draft/rough creation, AI outperforms human creatives.

Self-Doubt Can Curb Its Potential

Finally, Human creativity is plagued with self-doubt. Social feedback and reflection help people create meaningful and relevant art. But the trauma, anxiety, and too much negative feedback can create mental limits around the creative potential of humans.

AI creativity detaches humans from the technical process long enough that doubt cannot become a road bump or form a block in the creation process.

Will AI Take Over Creativity?

Volume seems to be the market's demand, and AI can outperform humans on that metric. The market also wants assets to be cheaper and AI working hours are cheaper than humans. Midjourney costs $4/hr to run, while Realm AI offers free credits. Such accessibility might make it seem like AI will take over creativity. But that won't happen.

Creativity will take over AI because human ideas (prompts) serve as inspiration for Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI engines are great at the technical mastery of rules, but great art is a result of breaking the rules, and great writing comes from nuance. AI isn't capable of either.

AI is not a threat to creativity because human creativity will remain essential to human survival. It might create temporary disruptions in certain creative fields but will eventually get appropriated by them as yet another tool.

Will AI Ever Take Over Art?

AI will never completely take over art, just like photography did not replace portrait painting completely. AIGC will become a parallel form of creative expression that will co-exist with manually generated content. Human creativity will remain essential in both forms of art.

Product illustration and digital fan art commissions might experience the steepest dip in demand because of AI's generative abilities. But art that celebrates the process will not become even slightly less relevant because of AI tools.

AIGC For Personal Expression

Realm.ai is a creative platform that lets you turn words into images. From building fantastical worlds to inserting yourself in movies, Realm.ai can help you express your ideas visually. The app also functions as social media for creatives who are enthusiastic about AI and its ability to expand human potential. Download the app and start training your AI today.

Final Thoughts

AI creativity and Human creativity are both generative phenomena. However, they aren't mutually exclusive in value. Where AI creativity is quick and easy to scale, human creativity is unique and culturally relevant. Artificial intelligence can speed up the technical aspects of creative expression, but ideas that resonate with other humans must come from humans. Generative AI capabilities are best used to aid human creative expression and not to replace it.

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