We need to invest in failure

What a time to be alive. For young people at the start of their creative careers, we are in a failing economy, graduate jobs are failing sharply across the board, and AI is eating into the kind of tasks and projects where a previous generation of young creative workers cut their teeth.

While legislation has attempted to tackle the exploitative practice of unpaid internships and the gig economy, it’s still the case that low-wage, entry level creative jobs demand a level of self-subsidy beyond the means of many young people. Social networks – and social confidence – raise another barrier to entry which reinforces inequalities of ethnicity, gender, geography and, especially, social class.

Compounding these inequities, creative subjects in state schools are in decline and opportunities for extra-curricular creative activities have been cut back by austerity and philistinism.

Meanwhile according to research by Heidi Ashton, private schools, sniffing a market opportunity, are investing in state-of-the-art drawing schools, media suites and specialist staff to further entrench their dominance not just in creative careers but in any career where creativity might offer a significant competitive advantage.

Future economy dominated by AI

That investment by the private education sector is based on a prediction that creative work – and creativity – will become more important in a future economy dominated by AI. Artificially generated, original creative thought is the gold standard for future AI development, yet it remains as elusive as 180 years ago when Ada Lovelace pronounced that her prototype design for a thinking machine had “no pretensions to originate anything”.

Last year, Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman claimed to have cracked this code, disingenuously announcing that he had been “really struck” by a piece of AI-generated creative writing – an artful meditation on the impossibility of machines experiencing grief and memory. Even Jeanette Winterson was impressed.

Altman being performatively impressed by his own reflection is surely more about PR and share prices than an honest assessment of ChatGPT’s potential for creative thinking. The real business of AI is more directed to low-hanging fruit: repeatable, mundane tasks like drafting emails or writing the next Marvel movie.

AI is after all, a business. Its branding and its CEOs might want to sell us the idea that AI is the creative future, but the financial and environmental costs of training a machine to produce even ‘AI slop’ is indefensible when the average human comes with creative thinking built in at no extra charge. From a business and marketing perspective, the future of AI does not lie in writing stories.

Making mistakes

What then is ‘creative thinking’, and how can we ensure our young people take advantage of what remains a key competitive advantage in a turbulent job market?

For me, human creativity is tied up with risk and failure. AI is trained not to make mistakes, to replicate, as closely as possible, an optimal outcome. That approach might allow a machine to copy and pastiche somebody else’s idea ad nauseam, but not to achieve a creative breakthrough. Of course, you can train a machine to make mistakes. But part of our human creativity – based on experiences honed over many lifetimes including our own – is choosing the right mistakes to make.

If we want to prepare our young people for a future creative career, we need to provide a space for them to make mistakes and learn from them. Universities and schools used to do this. Today, our marketized education system is relentlessly focused on core competences, transferable skills and employability.  But what about ‘unemployability’ – the ability to cope with fallow periods of unproductivity, uncertainty and disappointment, and turn these to our advantage?

Learning from failure

Talking to creatives during the Covid lockdown, I found lots of anxiety and uncertainty, but also an impatience for change – slack time generates future thinking. In a forthcoming book examining the future of creative work in Europe, Warwick University researchers have looked to the past – arguing that British success in the creative industries in the late 1990s was rooted in the benefits system of the 1980s, that Cool Britannia grew up on the dole.

If we want a new generation of creative talent, we need to be more generous in what Justin O’Connor has called our ‘foundational economy’ – the spaces, people and resources which allow young people to take risks and learn from failure.

We also need universities to encourage students to play with ideas and stories – not to teach them to press buttons. In the media and creative industries, technical skills (including essay writing) can be outsourced to AI. We need to be preparing our young creatives to work alongside Sam Altman’s AI drones, injecting a trace of human risk-taking into a system which profits from repetition.

Movie sequels are profitable, but every franchise starts with somebody trying something different, making a mistake, and trying another way. Finding space for this – in universities, in schools, in public funding for the arts, in our creative workplaces – will mean resisting demands for efficiency, accountability and productivity. But being unproductive, learning to use redundant time and making interesting mistakes are foundational skills for a future creative career. We need to invest in productive failure. It would be a mistake not to.