I struggle mightily with understanding why H.R. is so willingly making itself an enabler of generative A.I., specifically in the hiring of creatives, and in the displacement and replacement of creative talent.

At best, it is inconsistent and self-defeating. At worst, it is deeply immoral.

First, you put up requirements for creatives to showcase expensive art, design or writing degrees. Then, you expect them to prove their abilities by proffering extensive examples of their work experience, and providing references to back it up. Lastly, you expect to be served examples of creative work, which will presumably be judged (subjectively, but hopefully by people who are qualified to make that judgment), based on its inherent qualities. Then, at the very end, you expect them to replace all of that knowledge, all of that expertise, all of those evident qualities, with homogenized and industrialized machine output, reducing all of their varied experience to prompt writing. Why on Earth would anyone take on a mountain of student debt to learn a trade, taking pride in the quality of their work, using that pride to further the objectives of their employer, only to have their work be reduced to data entry, thereby becoming complicit in the complete erosion of their entire profession, and the depleted value of the skillset they’ve fought so long to attain?

There are profound problems inherent in equating generative A.I. with human expertise and human learning. Let’s be clear here: whatever A.I. tech advocates may say to the contrary, generative A.I. engines don’t actually learn in the true semantic sense of the word. They are not sentient, they are not able to draw conclusions and weigh them against each other, or extrapolate from what they see. There is no lateral thinking whatsoever. There is no trial-and-error, no judicious application of the many considerations going into the appropriateness and “feel” of creative work. There is no social context for the use of the output of generative A.I. These machines are trained to identify patterns, replicate them, and fuse together replicated pieces, like a high-tech meat grinder. This is a BIG difference compared to how humans work, how actual learning works, and how creativity works.

More importantly, that replication is fraught with legal, commercial and moral problems. Some examples:

TRUE LEARNING VS. REPLICATING
A human artist who learns from another artist would probably initially copy the other artist’s work, but eventually transcend those influences, and emerge with a style more their own. With generative A.I., sure, you can feed the machine examples of an artist’s work, but it doesn’t become that artist by ingesting those pieces of visual data, and it never develops aesthetic sensibilities of its own. All the A.I. learns how to do is to imitate that style, which is lightyears away from the organic inspiration and learning that happens between human artists. Moreover, the output is judged by how precisely the A.I. approximates someone else’s work, whereas a human artist is typically judged based on the uniqueness of their output. If a human artist simply replicated the work of another artist, there is a word for that: it is called counterfeiting. The counterfeiter could (and would!) be sued and be taken to court. Surely, you wouldn’t expect a company like Disney, for instance, to accept the wholesale, industrial scale duplication of artistic work they’ve spent generations refining, would you?

UNIQUE VS. COPYCAT
Then we have the field of branding and corporate identity, which would suffer immensely from the uncritical adoption of generative A.I. First of all, anything incorporated into a brand’s visual or verbal presence that has been created from replicated pieces of other creative output is obviously not unique, it goes without saying. Hence, it flies in the face of the very nature of brand building. Its value in defining a distinct identity, or catching the attention of potential customers by standing out, is inherently compromised. Second, what is not unique cannot be owned or claimed as your own: others can freely copy it, and the coherence and recognizability of a brand would suffer immensely from it. Commercially, this would devalue the brand, far more than any savings possible from using A.I.

DEVELOPING VS. vs. STEALING
There are ways of creatively developing new, improved forms of output without directly replicating something already existing, and that process is not new: it’s called R&D. The perennial truth in that field is that there are no shortcuts. If a car manufacturer wanted to develop a sportier car, they wouldn’t steal a racecar, take it apart, replicate its patented componentry, and implement it as-is. Instead, they would analyze the racecar, understand how it worked, and then apply whatever mechanical and aerodynamical principles that were observable and applicable to their product, and then iterate and test it until they found a workable set of components that produced the intended result, and were feasible to produce in an economical way. Part of that testing would involve how it felt to drive the car, a sensation that any A.I. would struggle to account for in its output. Moreover, the cheating involved in simply replicating existing components would be considered a crime; one for which the manufacturer would be taken to court and punished by the letter of the law. There’s an entire legal profession dedicated to this, and you better believe they are gearing up to incorporate the defense against abuse of A.I. into their law practices.

GROWTH VS. ATROPHY
If you, as an H.R. professional, think that you are contributing to growing the competence of your creative department by hiring people with a focus on generative A.I. usage, you have an extremely short-sighted perspective. Do you seriously think, for instance, that the creative ability to envision and visualize bespoke solutions won’t be affected if you have people do nothing but sit and feed prompts to a machine, and judge what of its output is usable…? That removing creative immersion in artistic decisionmaking will not lead to the atrophy of creative abilities in your staff…? Imagine if you had your Art Directors do nothing but conduct Google image searches all day, being fed algorithm-homogenized images for years, recycling the same visuals in a giant aesthetic echo chamber. Do you think they would ever come up with anything eye-opening or truly creative ever again? We’ve already seen the effects of algorithm-based selection of content in the increasingly isolated thought bubbles of social media: it leads to an erosion in human contact, and a depletion of human ingenuity. Instead of coming up with sentiments that more truthfully and genuinely represent people’s opinions and feelings, we are reduced to sharing and recycling memes, and using pre-defined emojis. Imagine applying that same homogenizing effect to the entire field of creative work! If that doesn’t give you pause, you seriously haven’t given it enough thought.

CONVINCING VS. CONNING
The entire field of marketing is based on the principles of persuasion: that advertising can somehow convince a potential customer to change their purchasing decision in your favor. This has, so far, been entirely dependent on human-to-human communication, as it should be. Meaning, if you are being persuaded, it was ultimately another human being who persuaded you. If they did so through illegitimate means – by exaggerating, obfuscating, lying, swindling – then that is something for which a human can be held accountable. In the case of machine marketing output, what does that accountability look like? Nobody knows, and it will take decades of legal wrangling in court to establish enough legal precedents for the law to be consider settled. In the meantime, we will see A.I.s step over the line and repeatedly lie to people, without knowing it is doing so, without its handlers knowing it did so, and without anyone being accountable. We’re already seeing that happen: very recently, a summer reading list with AI-generated content, including fake books and quotes, was published by several newspapers. This will lead to a deepening of already dangerous levels of untruth.

AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY
It is my firm belief that, at a certain level – say Director level and up – any professional should have a say in which tools are used to practice their trade, and how they are used. More than that, it should be part of their responsibilities. That is, in fact, part of what you are hiring them for, and more importantly, you should be hiring them to stand up for what is right, not to become unthinking tools of machine adoption. Denying professionals that agency, that choice, and that say in the execution of their own professional duties, is tantamount to a form of abuse – especially if it leads to the depletion and devaluing of their hard-earned capabilities, and the long-term dismantling of their own profession.

If you go into H.R. thinking that it’s your job to enable your employer’s abuse of their employees, I would suggest there is a deep flaw in your moral compass.

Shame on you.