IS AI REPLACING ARTISTS? WHAT THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY REALLY LOOKS LIKE
- The Takes
- Mar 21
- 3 min read
As AI tools reshape industries, from content creation to design, many are asking: Will AI replace human artists? In this sharp, creative insight, sixth-form student Marcie explores how AI is changing the creative arts, what roles are at risk, and why human emotion and originality may still be irreplaceable. If you're curious about AI in art, design, or media, do you agree with Marcie?
By Marcie B.
The use of AI in our everyday lives is on the increase. From facial recognition and voice assistants to marketing chatbots and virtual travel agents, we are using AI on a daily basis, whether we are aware of it or not!
As a 6th-form student studying creative subjects, this has got me thinking about my future career and university choices and what jobs are future-proof. What is the role of AI in the creative arts, and could machines possibly replace artists?
There is no doubt that AI has changed the creative arts industry into a different animal to what it looked like a couple of years ago.
With AI Technology, we can produce faster content and a lot cheaper, too—high-quality images at lightning speed, realistic videos, voiceovers, and passable copy. While this is great for commercial companies, who can use it to their financial advantage, jobs like illustrators, video game designers, translators, and printing companies are all feeling the consequences of AI.
An article on artsprofessional.co.uk says "Data published by DCMS show that for the 12 months up to the end of March 2024 the total number of jobs in the creative industries was 2,387,000, down from 2,457,000 the previous year, while the total number of culture sector jobs fell by 11,000 to 685,000."
When researching the use of AI in the creative sector, I strongly believe that it will not replace humans in every job but it can most certainly be used to enhance an individual's creativity in a number of ways. Equally, it can also help artists evolve and adapt and give them new ideas and ways of collaborating with AI to become more innovative. It can help artists to explore new creative avenues and push boundaries. AI can automate parts of the creative process, such as generating many versions of an image.
A good example of AI being used to enhance an artist's performance but by no means replacing them was the recently Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody’s character in the film The Brutalist. He plays a Hungarian man, and AI was used to make his accent more authentically Hungarian. The film industry has been using AI to its advantage for a while now in script editing, visual effects and marketing, and tailoring trailers or posters based on audience data.
Again, AI may have replaced humans in some of these departments, but the general consensus is that it can’t replace the authenticity and the reality of human experience.
I would like to think that AI is unable to replace artists for a number of reasons: as well as being intuitive and unpredictable, humans are emotionally rich with real-life experiences, which plays a major part in creativity. You can’t just turn firsthand experience into data!
Whether we like it or not, AI is a big part of our future, and if we embrace it in a positive way, using it to enhance creativity rather than replace it, then I have no doubt we will see a lot of amazing works created over the coming years.
However, with fewer job roles, competition within the creative sector will become fierce, and I think, ultimately, it will be humans' individuality, authentic storytelling, and creativity that stand out from the crowd.
By Marcie B.
