The Quiet Decay: A Meditation on Creativity in the Age of AI (Part 1 & 2)

Written by Chris Magdalenski

The Quiet Decay:
A Meditation on Creativity in the Age of AI From an Unreliable Narrator Pt. 1

I love technology. From as far back as I can remember being utterly fascinated with even the most basic tech gadgets. Be it my Little Professor Calculator, my Speak and Spell or my first interaction with a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, (I am truly dating myself here) I spent a lot of time pushing buttons and mashing keys in pursuit of… Something.

Now the keys push back.
Offering it little more than a few sentences, the machine hums in response,  hours of potential work eliminated with a handful of keystrokes.
And suddenly the line between tool and creator begins to blur.

AI art is astonishing. Terrifying. Beautiful in the way a collapsing star is beautiful — incandescent, destructive, impossible to ignore. What once took months of painstaking craft can now be summoned in seconds, called forth from a void of algorithms and memories - some say borrowed… Others say stolen.

But in this speed there is loss.
The messy frustrations of practice.
The painful imperfection of trying and failing.
The soul, or at least the illusion of one.

I find myself staring into these machine-made visions with awe and unease. They feel like echoes of something familiar, yet uncanny in their precision — like seeing a dream I didn’t know I had, painted for me by something that has never truly dreamed.

Is this creativity, or its simulation?
Does it matter?

Perhaps art has always been a dialogue with ghosts. We borrow, we remix, we imitate, we evolve. AI is simply the newest ghost in the room, louder and more insistent than the rest.

And yet…
There is still something quietly decaying at the edges of it all.
The patience of brushstrokes.
The sacredness of mistakes.
The slow burn of mastery.

Maybe the real question is not what AI can create, but what we will let wither away in exchange for the spectacle.

        •     •     •

Now, for the sake of this experiment, some honesty… A sizable chunk of the text above was generated using ChatGPT. As someone who has recently added “AI Ethicist In Training” to the about section of their LinkedIn it would be downright egregious not to mention this. The ethical consideration of AI has become a subject of great interest to me, most likely due to the fact that I’ve had to deal with it in both my day job as a UX designer and as a longtime visual artist and musician. Over the course of the past year a large part of my job involved designing software that integrated artificial intelligence into the products my company sold. The work was both interesting and challenging, providing not only valuable career experience, but also an entry into understanding how this technology works at a rudimentary level.

However, while I enjoyed the work I couldn’t ignore the discourse coming from those opposed to humanity’s latest achievement. Watching the reactions from my artist communities on social media made it plain that any technology that so blatantly took the humanity out of the creative process, all while stealing from flesh and blood artists’ work was not going to be received with open arms… It was a tide of voices that I wholeheartedly agreed with.

But at the same time being the fan of technology that I am, artificial intelligence still intrigued me. It’s newly developed ability to push pixels together to create fully formed pieces of “art”, to shape sound into complete songs, to thread words into what became the first half of the article was fascinating and terrifying.

Because just as much as I see potential in what can be done with AI, I also see the massive amounts of damage it could do, both to ourselves and to society as a whole.  

I have more thoughts on this to be sure, and the goal with this piece was not subterfuge, not to create easy content just for the sake of views, but rather as a way to more deeply investigate my own feelings about this new tool and the its ramifications on not just my own creative pursuits, but of humanity’s in general. To push myself, (and possibly others) to question these technologies from all angles in the hopes of having a clearer view of the future that is barreling towards us at breakneck speed.

All of which is to come in part two.

The Quiet Decay:
A Meditation on Creativity in the Age of AI From an Unreliable Narrator Pt. 2

I assure you that no Artificial Intelligence was used in writing this part of the post.

If you’re here I’m going to assume that my previous article didn’t annoy you enough to give up reading and put my name on a list of traitors to both art and humanity. The irony of having a machine give its “thoughts” about what its place should be, (if any) in pursuing creative endeavors is not lost on me, however the experience did help to refine some of my own thoughts around this issue.

In the process of creating part one, I fed ChatGPT the first paragraph, a few sparse notes on voice, tone and theme, as well as a couple of previous articles I had written for further reference on writing style. Upon reading what it gave back to me  I was hit with a tidal wave of rather complex emotions with all the force that one would expect when coming face to face with potential obsolesce. But while I’d love to say that revulsion was top of the list of those feelings, that wasn’t quite the case. 

Yes, as someone who was recently laid off from his tech job in no small part due to the somewhat dubious promises AI makes to desperate C-suite executives, there was plenty of revulsion involved, right alongside fear and resentment, but I’d be lying if I said those were the only feelings I had. Even though what it gave me wasn’t going to come close to winning a Pulitzer, and was undoubtedly just an amalgamation of sentiments stitched together from the work of better writers, I couldn’t help but to feel that the possibilities of this technology as a tool in a creative’s toolbox were there.

As someone who considers themselves an artist, the fact that I even entertained the idea of experimenting more with AI as a creative tool was, to quote Darth Vader… Disturbing. Especially when I could make a solid case that one of the reasons I lost my job was because someone felt that using “tools” like this could save their company some money.

After finishing part one of this piece I took a short break, collected my thoughts, and mulled some things over. It didn’t take long before I came to some conclusions around how I was going to proceed in using AI in creative endeavors going forward. It starts with a simple premise…

Our creativity makes us uniquely human. Once we cede too much of the process to the machine, we run the risk of losing part of ourselves.

I realize that this is not a new idea. And with how much machines have already become an integral part of creative workflows, it’s going to be something of an ever shifting line that’s always up for debate. But I believe that line and those debates are going to become as important a part of the process as someone sitting down to write a novel, paint a portrait, or craft a song. 

Because now that all of those things can be done to some extent with a few keystrokes, part of the creative process could well become the ability to avoid the temptation of letting the machine do the difficult parts for you. For some this will be easy. Maybe for others not so much. I’m not here to cast judgment on that, or to start to delineate the line between genuine human creativity and something else. But as time goes on, and these “tools” get better and better I think that temptation to use them for more and more is going to become harder to resist. We’re already see it playing out now, and while that’s certainly not unexpected it should give us pause to think about what state humanity will be in ten, twenty or fifty years down the road.

Will we have found a balance between the creative of man and the utility of machine. Or will that part of us have decayed so much that it is barely functional?