The ultimate twilight of creativity
Published at 2025-03-28T00:00:00+00:00
A quite absurd thought has been on my mind for quite some time. It’s a fact that since the dawn of Anthropocene, humanity has accumulated so many stories, books, music and later films, games, animations, videos, that a single person couldn’t possibly consume all that media over their lifetime even if they wanted, much less remember all of it.
To put this into numbers - you’d need to read about 4700 books each day, starting at birth, in order to read all the books published so far [1] or watch about 52 movies/TV series every day to catch up with all the productions [2]. This is absolutely staggering, even without mentioning all the other forms of media. Granted, not everything produced is of high quality, but my point is that if you can think of a story, there is a big chance that it, or something similar at least, has already been told.
What’s more, this process of constant publishing is not stopping and with the rise of AI it’s actually accelerating rapidly. Nowadays everyone can generate texts, images, videos using AI, with barely any effort, skills or knowledge. Fortunately, the AI is not there yet to completely take over, but I keep imagining this distant sci-fi world where *everything has already been made*. There are no more interesting stories to be told, people drown in the ocean of entertainment (would be cool to see a sci-fi story set in such a world one day).
Still, someone may point out that there’s always going to be innovation, that the humanity (or our future AI overlords) will keep coming up with new forms of art, creating new tools for the artists to operate with, like when films first appeared and then video games less than a century later. Now, I’d actually agree with that. Up to a certain point in the future I can imagine new innovations in the area of art and entertainment to occur. However, there are only so many senses that humans posses. Were we to create a perfect simulation, is there anywhere to go from there?
I don't want to be all so negative about it, anyhow. First of all, this is basically a thought experiment and we’re nowhere close to the point where such a twilight of creativity has actually been reached (although the amount of stupid remakes and remasters corporations pump out nowadays may suggest we’re slowly getting there). Most importantly though, who cares? Art and creativity do not exist in a vacuum. What really matters is the impact that they have on you and the others around, or maybe it doesn’t have any impact at all. I like to believe that nature creates art all the time. The rock formations, the shapes of trees, the spots on cheetah’s fur. Is it not art if no-one’s there to experience it?
In the game “Stellaris” scientists surveying systems across the galaxy may stumble upon a planet full of monoliths carved into the planet’s surface, arranged as a massive art installation. I love that the devs came up with a story like this. For it shows that even though the creators of this art installation might not be here anymore, and they could not possibly envision visitors from distant future discovering it, they still made something beautiful for the sake of it.
To bring my already derailed train of thought to a final destination – I think I found my creative catharsis in the fact that eventually everything might already exist, that we are flooded with so much content, vast amounts of media, impossible to keep track of for a single individual, so what you personally experience and put out into the world literally doesn’t matter, and either has most likely been tried before, or will be created in the future. And it’s totally fine. What makes a random book in a used book store better than a thousand others around it? The only realistic impact you can really make as an individual is on yourself and people around you, so just make shit for the fun of it. Not for seeking validation, chasing after ideals, or some extrinsic motives.
Write a story and then share it with your friends. That, or cast into the flames. Doesn’t really matter. Learn something that’s completely useless. Make a totally broken game. Pick up a piece of paper and grace it with the most hideous picture the world has ever seen, then paint it all black. Doesn’t matter. Just whatever it is, don’t make AI do all the work for you. It’s really neither fun nor rewarding. Even if what you make is terrible, your personal experience making something and the humanity behind the piece is what makes it special.
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