Tobold's Blog
Thursday, March 19, 2026
 
Creativity tools as barriers to entry

I have a vivid image in my mind of a group of medieval monks brandishing handwritten bibles protesting in front of Johannes Gutenberg's print shop in Mainz in 1450. I see that image every time I read on some forum about artists complaining about their jobs being taken away by artificial intelligence. The thing is, in hindsight over the past 6 centuries, the invention of the movable-type printing press is considered to be a good thing. It is credited with catalyzing the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

But of course, any tool that allows faster mass communication of creative ideas also has its dark sides. We all know examples of how the internet led to echo chambers, spread conspiracy theories, or was used to harm others. AI generated images, especially deepfakes, are certainly able to harm others. But maybe we need to zoom out, and look at it from a wider, historical perspective.

I do not think that people in the middle ages did not have interesting lives, or lacked ideas. But we know very little about their lives and ideas, because it would have been prohibitively expensive for them to write these things down. The late middle ages saw parchment from animal skin replaced by the arrival and development of paper. Woodblock printing allowed for making copies of the same document, and the movable-type printing press made the production of pamphlets and books a lot easier and cheaper. That basically removed a barrier to entry, allowing more people to write down their lives or spread their ideas.

A catholic priest in the 15th century didn't like this removal of barriers to entry, and would argue that it allowed for the spread of "heresy". But this "heresy" included humanism, enlightenment, and science. If you remove barriers to entry for mass communication, you simply get *more* ideas spreading. Some of these are good, others are bad. But we are way past the point where we think that organizations like churches or governments should have a monopoly on ideas or information.

Having written 6,736 posts on this blog for over two decades, I certainly do not disdain writing skills. Nor do I think that skills in drawing or painting are bad. But these skills do constitute a barrier to entry for people who might have creative ideas, but not the skills to express them. And it isn't inherently bad to remove these barriers to entry and allow more people to share their ideas. And yes, some of the ideas shared that way will be bad. But there is also the possibility of some ideas being good.

For example, having worked in science and science funding, I have observed over the course of my career that the best presented scientific proposals weren't necessarily the scientifically best proposals. There are scientists that have great ideas, but who aren't great salespeople, and so they never get their proposals funded. While others have generic ideas, but are good at selling them to the people who give the funding. An AI able to write a funding proposal well could be useful, as long as the scientific idea behind is valuable.

In art, there was a time when being able to paint a scene or person realistically was highly prized. The invention of photography made that particular skill less useful. But that in return led to art movements like impressionism, trying to capture subjective sensory experiences and representing personal perception rather than photorealism. I have no doubt that AI generated images will not lead to the death of art. But it will allow people that have no skills in drawing or painting to express the images they have in their mind. I now should have used an AI image generator to create that painting of the monks protesting Gutenberg, but you get the idea.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:51 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
Tobold: "An AI able to write a funding proposal well could be useful, as long as the scientific idea behind is valuable."

The AI would enable many more people to pass the barrier and be eligible for funding review. But now the million dollar question: how do you sift through the hundreds of AI generated proposals to find the valuable ideas?
Everyone would now be able to spin their perpetuum mobile idea into an extravagant text, prop it up with with buzz words, complicated phrasing, drawings, you name it and present it for review.

My issue is less with images or movies where you can fairly easy decide whether they are worth your viewing time but rather with the text generators.
The text are "copied" together from existing texts and do appear to be sound. But there is no easy way to extract and distil the meaningful content. You need to read through paragraphs of text, wrap your head around things until you stumble over the pieces of information that don't add up.

I have no easy solution for that besides deciding to stay away from any content that is filler and throwaway and therefore prone to AI usage.
I don't want to put time into reading something where the author didn't feel like putting time into writing it.
# posted by Blogger Camo : 19/3/26 14:18
 
@Camo: "how do you sift through the hundreds of AI generated proposals to find the valuable ideas?"
You use AI, obviously! ;-) The solution to problems caused by AI is usually more AI. It will be a constant race between slop generators and slop detectors for the rest of our days. Which may not be that long, if certain people are correct.
# posted by Blogger Perkus : 19/3/26 20:22
 
By the wat, this is already happening with job applications. Companies receive far more applications for any given job, written by AI. They then use AI to read those applications and find the best candidate. It isn’t working very well.
# posted by Blogger Tobold : 19/3/26 22:18
 
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