The WGA agreement may have changed our relationship with AI creativity

Why is all this important? Because the creative arts, even low ones like TV and comic books, serve a huge purpose in our civilization. They create, sustain and provide the metaphors needed to survive in the social environment we find ourselves.

The world is too coimplex for any of us to have real understanding. But good metaphors help us find success and maybe a little understanding. Metaphiors, rules of thumb, parables etc. help simplify complexity so people can survive the social environment they inhabit.

But what happens if, due to disruptive technologies and the new economies they create,
the social environemnt changes? Old metaphors do not work (“Those strangers from the East must be messengers from Quetzalcoatl” or “let’s cut down the last tree on the island so we can move these large stone heads into place”). Without new metaphors, failure and collapse await.

The creative arts are great at helping us learn the new metaphors necessary for success. They often become immensely popular because of this. To me, it is not coincidence that some of the most popular movies of all time deal with groups of people doing the heroic things. Hatty Potter. The Avengers. Mission Impossible. They were not strictly the Hero’s Journey tale told so often. They were about individuals coming together to fight a complex enemy, each bringing their own strengths to the overall success, rather than one Dirty Harry individual who singlehandedly solved the problems.

Because to be successful today requires collaboration of diverse, differently thinking people to be able to solve complex problems unattainable just a decade ago. Climate change, Human health. And Ai is not going to be able to take metaphors of the past to create metaphors for the future.

They will not be much help as the world changes, probably giving mixed metaphors rather than the understanding human creative works would.