Trading Tools

Let's say we have two people:

One is a traditionally trained artist of some kind (painter, sculptor, cartoonist, etc.) who has never used generative AI before.

The other is somebody who has never been trained in any traditional art or practice it on their own, but has been using generative AI for as long as it's been around (just to be as fair as possible)

If we give them eachother's tools, what would happen?

The most likely outcome is that the traditional artist, already having practiced using their skill to bring something from their imagination into reality, would pick up generative AI very quickly. (This is my experience. As a visual artist, musician, and a decent writer, when I tried AI image generation in the past, I found it intuitive and easy, and got some pretty interesting and unique results almost immediately just with prompting.)

On the other hand, while the AI artist has most definitely learned something about creativity through their process, they would still need the same amount of time and practice as the traditional artist took to reach anywhere close to the same output. We can grant that perhaps their ability to visualize or imagine has deepened, but can they execute that vision with another tool?

And if we send them both back in time to a theoretical paleolithic setting, where neither of their tools exist (assuming they can survive and have free time to make art), the traditional artist would more quickly and intuitively find ways to create art with the most rudimentary tools (charcoal, rocks, sticks, mud, animal skins, plant fibers, etc.), because they intuitively know how to use their hands to make art, while the AI artist would, again, need much more time to practice and learn those skills.

This is not a "AI bad, real artist good!" statement. I just think that comparisons between the reliance an AI artist has on their tool, and the reliance a traditional artist/musician has on their tool really are just not even close. But more importantly, they ignore the effect and depth of integration that practice with a tool over and over and over again for years has on a person's ability to translate those skills to other parts of their life, or to other forms of creativity, precisely because without practice, it is not intuitive or easy.

Learning how to do something difficult makes other things easier. Learning to do something easy rarely does the same, or at the very least, not nearly as much.