SINGAPORE: There’s not a day that goes by that people don’t see a product of AI—it’s almost everywhere on social media. We see a hint of it in advertising posters and billboards displayed on the streets, and it’s even on online shopping websites, where the models aren’t real people or celebrities anymore but are artificial people made by AI human generators.
This leads us to ask: are the talents of those working in the creative industry going to be obsolete soon?
One Singaporean job candidate trying to break into the creative industry recently found herself wondering just that after AI came up in every one of the five interviews she attended.
“What are your thoughts on AI?”
“Do you use AI in your work?”
“It’s always something along those lines,” she wrote, irked by how the interviewers seemed more interested in her AI skills than her actual background and creative abilities.
“Personally, I’m not a fan of AI. Like, I’m not totally against it—I use it when I feel like it’s necessary—but I don’t like making AI do my job. Have you guys experienced the same thing? How do you answer the question?”
After going through the same line of questioning five times, she said it felt as though “companies are pushing for AI everywhere now.”
“It’s just a bit weird to me, especially when everything looks the same to me now because of AI. What happened to individuality? What happened to appreciating the craft? Why the need to use AI when something can be done better without it?”
One word: convenience. These days, people don’t need to labour over how to solve simple problems or rack their brains trying to come up with a good design. With AI, almost everything can be done in the blink of an eye.
But of course, there is a drawback that many people don’t talk about enough: the gradual decline in how much we use our own brains. When people become too reliant on AI, they may exercise skills such as critical thinking, memory and language less often.
Just this week, a manager at an international company in Singapore had complained on Reddit about his Gen-Z associate, who, according to him, doesn’t want to think “critically.”
“I am struggling to get my Gen Z colleague to think critically,” he wrote on the r/singaporejobs forum. “Her work often feels AI-generated, and when I probe further and ask her for her thought process and why/how she came up with the content, I get vague responses.”
“This is not the first time this has happened, and I wonder why she struggles in the critical thinking department?”
In response, one commenter pushed back against the idea that this was specifically a Gen Z problem, arguing that millennials can struggle with critical thinking too.
“Eh, Gen Zs aren’t alone in not being able to think critically. Even millennials can’t. This has nothing to do with generations, but rather I feel like our smartphones and digital devices has reduced the ability for a lot of people to think critically.”
The potential impact of AI on how people think has also been examined in research. In January this year, a paper titled “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking” was published, exploring how reliance on AI may affect cognitive skills.
The study drew on surveys and in-depth interviews with 666 participants from different age groups and educational backgrounds.
The researchers concluded that AI tools “may inadvertently diminish users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking processes.”
Younger participants who reported heavier reliance on AI were also found to have “scored lower in critical thinking” than their older peers.
‘There’s no need for it’
Back on the creative professional’s post, one commenter disagreed with her views and suggested that she simply “doesn’t understand AI.”
She responded, “I do understand AI. I’m just not blindly diving into it, especially when you look at the environmental impact it creates. Why force your employees to use AI when there’s actually not a need for it?”
“Let’s say you’re to design a poster. Why the need to incorporate AI when you can absolutely just create it with your skills?”
The same goes for writing, she added. If someone can write a social media caption themselves in roughly the same amount of time, she questioned why AI needed to be involved at all.
“AI helps automate and streamline work. I agree it definitely helps with that, but it’s usually not the case for every industry,” she continued. “But somehow everyone everywhere just wants AI, AI, AI. To me, you should learn it properly first; if not, we all just end up relying on AI for everything.”/TISG
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