By Antonino Vaccaro and Rosa Fioravante
In the artificial intelligence onslaught of recent years, many business leaders are scrambling to balance adoption of the technology at speed with protecting human creativity.
When AI tools can generate texts, images, video and audio in a matter of seconds, what constitutes creative expression? What makes it human? Why does preserving human creative expression matter?
In considering the potential economic opportunities presented by the adoption of generative AI, decision makers may face an ethical dilemma over having to choose whether to prioritize speed in technological adoption, or to dedicate the time and resources to ensure ethical compliance in the use of the technology for humans to flourish.
This is not the only ethical AI dilemma business leaders are grappling with. But we wanted to understand specifically the ethics around creativity, since one of the novelties of generative AI is that it has the potential to automate, and/or augment and integrate human creative expression, that most human of activities.
Generative AI threatens human expression in at least two ways: by disregarding existing creative work through its use without adequate permission or recognition, and by replacing creative jobs in organizations.
For example, a group of news organizations led by The New York Times has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI for using their articles without consent or payment – which they allege is massive copyright infringement – to train its large-language models. At the same time, more than a quarter of work tasks in arts, design, entertainment and sports could be automated with AI, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
To understand the ethics, we start by looking at the foundations of creativity through the lens of personalism, a worldview that emphasizes the centrality of the human person, the starting point for all ontological and epistemological understanding. Personalism believes in human exceptionalism and irreplaceability, and thus places much importance on the human attributes that should never be disregarded. Personalism also emphasizes the role of creativity in expressing a person’s intrinsic morality and, therefore, dignity.
Since generative AI impacts a morally salient dimension of human life, decisions on its use should be rooted in ethics. Organizations bear the responsibility of ensuring their economic sustainability through technological innovation, as well as fostering human flourishing through creative expression.
3 Concepts to Understand Human Creative Expression
Thus, we build on this understanding to present a three-dimensional model based on the concepts of uniqueness, relationality and unpredictability:
Uniqueness
The originality of an output stems directly from the creator’s uniqueness and participation in the creative act. Creative expression is understood as an expression of the inner self and uniqueness is a quality that distinguishes every human being.
With generative AI, the absence of the creator’s direct involvement undermines claims of the output’s uniqueness. That may not matter in some applications: a mass-market advertising campaign, for example, may not be entirely unique. But where uniqueness matters, a participatory approach is necessary, in which creative professionals contribute insights into the compatibility of AI deployment with creative processes and objectives. This entails collaborative decision-making processes that bring together creative professionals and organizational stakeholders.
Relationality
Artistic creation is the expression of the creator’s interior self but it is also closely linked to their dynamics with others. There is a give and take, a process of reciprocal recognition, between the creator and the audience.
In industries that rely on generative AI for artistic and creative output design, careful attention must be paid to the relationship between creators and external stakeholders. Generative AI accelerates the creative process and enables the exploration of numerous possibilities in a shorter time frame, but it lacks the continuous exchange between different perspectives inherent in human interaction. Again, collaboration is the key: organizations should integrate professionals skilled in prompt engineering with humanistic experts in artistic and intellectual endeavors. This multidisciplinary approach ensures that the relational aspect of the creative process is preserved, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of audience needs and the broader societal impact of creative outputs.
Unpredictability
In personalism thinking, the act of creation revolves around the exercise of freedom beyond necessity. A person is not limited to choosing among already existing options, but rather may create new options, scenarios and possibilities. The act of creation is the act of pushing something new into the existing world.
But what if a machine creates something harmful or inappropriate? Humans in the loop may contribute to various stages of the AI process, including dataset curation and content validation. This can be attained by reinforcing the presence of human reviewers to evaluate generative AI outputs, flagging certain content before such models are released to the public.
Much of the debate around generative AI and creative expression has focused on the outputs. Outputs are important, but we believe that organizations should begin with the people who create and the foundations underpinning human expression, when making decisions on AI deployment. In doing so, they bring ethics into the decision-making process.
Antonino Vaccaro is a professor in the Department of Business Ethics at IESE Business School. Rosa Fioravante is a research fellow at IESE’s Center for Business in Society and teaches a Business Ethics and Social Responsibility course at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics.