How History’s Greatest Artists Used Collaboration—And What AI Means for the Future of Creativity
As a creative person, with a lot of books and artwork in my portfolio, I think a lot about AI and its use in creative work. I absolutely love working with AI as a collaborative partner, and it vexes me, hearing everyone go on and on about how creations produced with AI is not art.
There hasn’t been enough critical thought around this, I believe, especially in the artistic community. Obviously, the complexity and elaborate nature of the images that you can produce with Midjourney or Flux or any of the other generative models used for images, has put a lot of people back on their heels. It feels like unfair competition, especially because you can create so many of these images so quickly, with relatively little effort. The quality varies, of course, but the sheer volume and scope of the creative potential is breathtaking, even terrifying.
The thing is, if we look at AI as a sort of apprentice or assistant, and we look at the history of master artists using assistants to produce their work, we uncover a rich tradition of complex and extensive collaboration which produced some of the finest art we have.
In fact, the whole concept of an artist being a solitary, lone suffering genius is a relatively new one. And even the artists who we believe worked alone, often didn’t.
So, after thinking about this a great deal, and discussing it at length with my AI persona team over a period of weeks, maybe months, we worked together to produce this short book. It’s not the final definitive word on collaborative or creation, but it does raise important questions that we all need to think about carefully before we start judging the creative process with AI.
As a matter of fact, using a small army of assistants and other skilled artists to produce work that you’ll put your name on has a long and distinguished tradition. That has long been, in fact, the Masters’ Tactic.