There are many claims on how Artificial Intelligence will automate so much. It will be the first technology that can automate certain things like writing – in essence, the humanities.

But these things can’t be automated. It may look like you’ve got the computer to do something that previously took a human many hours of labour, but you haven’t got the same thing. Even if AI manages to rid itself of ‘hallucinations’ (for which, read ‘errors’) and other weird tics, you don’t end up with the same product you would have had if a human had done it.

The Industrial Revolution automated many things: trains automated travel so you could just sit there instead of walking; wool could be spun at an unprecedented rate.

But when it comes to writing poetry, or a letter, or a novel, AI can’t automate these. Such ‘products’ depend on the connection formed between the creator and the reader. It’s not just that the creator has to be a human. It’s that the human element is embedded in what a ‘novel’ is. It may look like the AI has spat out a story, but it’s not the same.

Even before generative AI we could see examples that show how certain things just can’t be automated. Imagine an illuminated manuscript. It would take one of the few literate people days or weeks to create one, and we marvel over the attention to detail as well as the beauty. But then word processors came along (I skipped a bit of history, but…). You could just press keys and the letters appeared. But we don’t consider illuminated manuscripts to have been automated, even if machines could produce them.

A personal example: a young lad saw my Games Workshop models, and thought they were cool. Then when he found out I’d hand painted them (and I’m no pro!) he was amazed. But why? Nothing about them had changed in that moment, but even he might shrug his shoulders at a machine doing something neatly. When you know a human’s involved, the values change.

Use AI for something else

We’re going to be deluged with junk that people make with AI that they never could have before, at volumes they never could have, before its advent. Some will claim this is democratising creativity. But they’re wrong. They’re trying to fool us all into believing that the value is purely in the end product, and it’s not always.

But if you really want to get some benefit from AI in your business, if you want to take advantage of it and the environmental and social ills are not things that bother you, then surely there might be something useful you can do. But I’m afraid no one’s going to work out what that is for you! You’ll need good old-fashioned human creativity to work out how to put AI to best use. It will do very little without prompting, after all.

So if you’re going to use AI, try to find something that you genuinely can’t do without it. Something that a powerful algorithm can process, that would take a human a lifetime. Don’t just get it to pretend you’ve done something that only a real artist can achieve.