Most young creatives are using AI to make things
Image credit: Elias Lobos
The majority of young people are using artificial intelligence within their creative process, according to a new survey.
Are you a creative? If yes, do you use AI to help you in any part of the process? If you answered no to that then you might be in the minority.
That’s according to the results of a new survey by Youth Music that found two-thirds of creatives aged 16-24 use AI to help them create. Of the young creatives surveyed, 63% said that they will use an AI tool for at least some part of the creative process.
I’m not too far outside of that age bracket, but the number came as a surprise to me. Mostly, because it made me wonder what AI tools they’re using and how they’re so prolific. Thankfully, the budding young creators surveyed offered up some insight.
Lewis Dobbs is a third-year media and creative industry student based in Leamington Spa in England. He explains: “AI allows me to do jobs faster, which was pretty shocking at first, but once I used it over and over again it became a part of my daily practice and a part of my job. I think in that sense it’s really great when you’re allowed to control it and be in charge.”
Tom Auton is a 24-year-old musician and producer from Cardiff. He says: “It’s helped me expand my vocabulary by looking at different kinds of phrases, different sorts of words than what I would normally use in a song. Sometimes when it’s just written there in front of you, by the AI, it makes you look at it in different ways.”
Another musician, singer-songwriter Jenni from Manchester, reveals: “AI has made it that (much) quicker because I’ve got folders ready to draw inspiration from, or it’s thrown out a chord progression that I’ve really liked – I can then write lyrics from that and now there’s a song that’s been written way quicker.”
The use of AI slowly dissipates the older the demographics in the survey get, though it never disappears from use. In creatives over the age of 55, 19% of the surveyed said that they use AI to aid their creative process.
The proliferation of AI has created a difficult discussion over the right and wrong uses of it. Does it impinge on the authenticity of creation or is it a tool that can simply help us achieve our creative aspirations where we might not have been able to before? There are so many different AI tools and some are used to empower creators whilst others rip creators off.
On the one hand, you have AI being trained on copyrighted content without consent to produce generated versions of artists. On the other hand, you have YouTube doing the exact same thing to create fake tracks for use in Shorts with the permission of the artists whose voices are used.
Tom Auton, the musician quoted above, explains his thoughts: “If AI could do those mundane, boring tasks that nobody enjoys, humans could spend more time on the things that humans are meant for – being creative and thinking of innovative ideas. I feel like this is a good thing.”
Lewis Dobbs, quoted earlier, adds: “(Whilst) you can ask AI ‘How do I make a song from scratch?’, and it will come up with something, I feel like there’s always going to be human knowledge or human experience that allows you to make something you really want to make.”