Why AI Hits Art And Culture Differently Than IT Healthcare Finance And Banking
Why is the art and culture segment of the market and the creative industry affected by the existence of AI differently than IT healthcare finance corporate and banking?
Let’s talk about it.
For the last couple of years we have seen the vast development and the aggressive progressive development of AI resources in the creative industry. In film. In art. In what people consider to be art. In social media creation. In content creation. In the way Content creators influencers founders artgalleries artists and every creative agency now have to look at tools like ChatGPT Claude Cowork workflow automation and every social media management tool that promises faster output.
And many people are like well artists are redundant now right? People with creative input are redundant. People in the film industry are made redundant. That is where the conversation already starts wrong.
The AI Conversation In The Creative Industry Is Not The Same Conversation
When AI enters IT healthcare finance corporate or banking it mostly enters as optimization. It enters as workflow automation. It enters as a system that handles patterns. It organizes information. It checks data. It speeds up tasks. It supports decisions that already have strong frameworks around them.
But when AI enters art and culture it touches authorship. It touches likeness. It touches voice. It touches the body of work of a person. It touches memory. It touches interpretation. It touches the inner world of an artist.
That is different.
I made a video where I talked about Matthew McConaughey and the point he made around his likeness and voice. The message was clear. Someone might use his face. Someone might use his voice. Someone might use his past performances. But y’all are going to pay royalties because his body of work did not come from nowhere. It came from labor. It came from presence. It came from his life and from the work that also feeds his family.
That is one way of looking at it and it is a serious one.
Royalties And IP Need To Get Their Shit Together
When an illustrator works for a company and that company says use our Adobe Creative Suite with AI inside it there is a question that needs to be asked. Listen. Is your creative input being used to train that program? Where are the royalties? Where is the IP? Where is the agreement that says artists have a position in this?
When that conversation has not happened artists have nothing solid to stand on.
This is going to be a phase where the conversation around royalties and IP needs to get its shit together. Corporations are afraid of that. Oh they are afraid of that. Because the moment artists ask where their data went and who profits from their style their archive their visual decisions and their labor the whole structure becomes less comfortable for those who thought the creative field was easy to absorb.
Kate Crawford supports this point in Atlas of AI. Her work shows that AI is not neutral. It is built from data labor resources and extraction. That supports this conversation because the creative industry is not dealing with AI as a clean tool. It is dealing with systems that have been trained on human work and human culture.
AI Does Not Have Introspection And Retrospection
The reason AI affects art culture and the creative industry differently is this.
AI does not have introspection and retrospection. It does not. Point blank period.
It is because of introspection and retrospection that human beings move from imagination to visualization. From memory to creation. From pain to interpretation. From society to image. From inner world to sound. From exterior world to film. From the human condition to paintings photographs music performance and writing.
AI is not able to do that from lived experience.
It is able to produce synthetic media assets. It is able to support a social media management system. It is able to help with outsourcing social media. It is able to sit inside Social media management tools and produce output at scale. It is able to respond to prompts. But refusal based on feeling. Refusal based on moral weight. Refusal based on memory. Refusal based on the body. That belongs to human beings.
Joanna Zylinska writes about AI art as something that forces us to question creativity and authorship. Her work supports this point because the question is not only whether a machine produces an image. The question is what kind of subject stands behind that image. What kind of experience made it necessary.
The Human Experience Will Become More Valuable
In the next two to three years there will be a surge toward work that feels human. Work that demonstrates human experience. Work that carries the weight of introspection and retrospection.
It will no longer be a question of is this AI or not. People will know when it is AI generated. There will be synthetic information. Synthetic media. Synthetic ways of doing and enjoying media. That has always existed in different forms. Now we see it through AI.
But people will still want to be connected to the human experience.
You are human first.
And in human beings there is introspection and retrospection. That is not a pattern. The outcome of what introspection and retrospection does inside a person is not always predictable. Human beings are fickle. Artists are fickle. What goes into the head of an artist is a black box. That black box is what makes art art.
Lev Manovich has written about AI aesthetics and how machine systems produce images through patterns and datasets. That supports this article because art is not only about output. It is also about the unpredictable relation between a person society memory body and form.
Artists Already Possess What AI Is Chasing
For many artists who are against AI the feeling is understandable. But being against something without knowing what it is also weakens the position.
Learn what it stands for. See what it does. See what it does not do. That is the only way to understand the distinction.
Standing on the sideline and saying this is only a threat already diminishes what artists naturally possess. Those who say creativity is no longer worthy are often the same people who never had access to that way of creating in the first place. That is why they are so happy with AI resources.
Artists do not need to become that.
The creative industry still needs the human black box. Film needs it. Music needs it. Painting needs it. Photography needs it. Content creators need it. Influencers need it. Founders and every creative agency that understands culture need it.
AI has tools.
Artists have interior life.
That difference is why art and culture are affected differently. And that difference will become more valuable in the coming time. I guarantee you that.
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