Is the algorithm killing creativity?

And what can we do about it...

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

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Call me a grumpy Gen X’er all you like, but I feel like I remember a time when things seemed new and fresh. When movies, or music, or art could genuinely surprise me. Now, of course it could be a kind of borrowed nostalgia for a misremembered time, you know that instinct to look back to a golden past instead of forward, but I beg, dear reader, for you to hear me out.

I was talking about how we are continuously spoon-fed content based on what we have seen and interacted with before, and how the algorithm effectively creates an echo chamber of confirmation bias, with my husband recently when we were discussing the prevalence of social media influencing popular opinion – regardless of how accurate or factual it is.

It occurred to me that this appetite for passive consumption has trickled down into the creative space. How when I switch on Netflix I am presented with an array of choices influenced by what I or members of my family have watched before. Or how, when I flick to the Spotify app on my phone, I am fed a playlist of musicians, artists and songs that fit the bill when it comes to what I like to listen to…

With that desire to fill my life with content that matches what I have previously liked so that I watch it, or consume it, and effectively ‘pay’ for it, the algorithm has robbed me of being presented with something truly innovative, new or exciting. And you can’t help but wonder how this desire to ‘trend’ on social media – to hit the numbers – to create a media storm is in turn influencing the creators or the gatekeepers of creativity (the publishing houses, the music labels, the movie studios) to just keep churning out the same old shit because people seem to like it (I’m looking at you Adam Sandler).

I see this every day in my own creative life too. I know from my work as a branding consultant that what consumers apparently ‘want’ is consistency… How your social media profile needs to look consistent – in fact there’s a massive industry built up around just this. Social media consultants work with a templated structure to create clones after clones after clones of accounts that all look the same, sound the same, feel the same…

But is this true? Is this truly the reality of the world we live in? Are my artist friends (and I) really expected to spend the rest of our lives creating the same old shit just because people seem to like it? Are we really destined to never again be allowed to pivot, or grow, or experiment…? For fear of upsetting the algorithm and being cast into social obscurity, destitution, and starvation…. I mean a girl’s gotta make a living right!

It is generally accepted that artificial intelligence is not the best judge of creative works, or original ideas, so why is it that we are leaving our delivery of content to the mercy of the judgement of algorithms? Why, have we accepted that, with the algorithm’s inability to judge content quality, and reliance on other factors, quality is inevitably pushed to the bottom of the list of priorities. By creating a ranking-centric approach – we have diluted or entirely eliminated investment and dedication to content innovation and quality.

There was a time when you could see something and think “I’ve never seen anything like this”. But somewhere along the line we have got accustomed to the idea that we won’t really hear or see anything new again. There is an inherent negativity in our expectations whether we admit to it or not.

I think that the key thing to remember is that the gatekeepers of creativity want an immediate return on their investment. With the advent of streaming 24/7, the demand for new content requires a risk averse approach. Studios can’t afford for content to bomb. Gone are the days where we all sat down collectively and watched the same thing on the TV at 8pm on a Saturday night and caused a nationwide power surge by putting the kettle on during the ad break. Long gone are the days where we waited a week to see what would happen in our favourite shows. Now we want to be fed new content, immediately – with no requirement to wait. Bingeing is the new waiting. So is it any surprise that we get served up the same tired old dish again and again when we just keep on eating it up?

Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in imagination – the disasters they depicted acted as a narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Today they seem more like an exacerbation of the world than an alternative to it. We have sleepwalked into the Matrix under the pretence of innovation and progression…

So what is the answer? Could a return to human curation help to create an online world that values the quality of content over the quantity of likes. Could we dream of a world where click bait would rapidly fade away. Advertisers could have greater trust in platforms and creators could, as a consequence, earn more for their work. Trusted human curators could promote a greater diversity of creators. And perhaps, most controversially, a belief about being authentic and genuine, and not just on a surface-level hashtag sense could once again cut through. In turn, enabling creators to do what they do best – be creative.

It feels, at best, like a fairytale answer to a dystopian reality…