Will AI augment the skill and initiative of craftspeople or destroy it?

Since the first edition of Ceramic Review way back in January/February 1970, either an image of a ceramic or the ceramicists making them has been featured on the cover. And fortunately for us, as every issue has been digitised, all of them can be viewed online. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone interested in pottery and ceramics.

This changed with Edition 327’s cover in April this year. Instead this edition cover featured a Midjourney AI illustration of a vessel by artist Elana Howard. For me, it was a moment that illustrated the trap AI potentially represents for makers. It’s not an overstatement to say also with potential consequences for the capabilities of humankind in general.

If you’ve read any other posts in this blog - thank you! - you’ll know my involvement with the digital world goes back 40 years and began in 1984 by launching Apple’s Macintosh computer in the UK when I was a young advertising executive. It continued into brand identity and digital business design with large organisations and my own consultancy practice for sixteen years, then as a representative of the Open Data Institute in Cornwall. All these activities and others have enabled me to become a narrator of digital and social history. For a decade now, I have also been a potter.

A decade’s a relatively short time in ceramic practice and though Artificial Intelligence’s powered by recursive intelligence, that’s to say constant improvement at speed, it’s also very early days in the development of AI.

Clay and AI are both materials that have to be wrangled with to fully understand them and to develop a mastery of how to work with them. The key difference is that, for the artist and to be an artist, AI must serve the work, rather than the other way round.

Of course, an imagined work of clay is not itself, nor will ever be, a ceramic. It doesn’t have the durability or longevity that clay has which, as we know, has lasted for millennia. It’s also not likely to offer all the possibilities of uniqueness in form and rendering available to the true artist at one with clay as a medium. AI art is endlessly replicable, fleeting in its appeal and uninterested in the deft handling of chemical metamorphoses in the ways that clay is. 

The nature of AI is it sequestrates creative originality from others. It’s this darker side of Artificial Intelligence I’m interested in, the deadening of initiative. This, I think is something we are at risk of with AI. It’s ease and convenience may undermine the value of crafting in the broadest sense and in the long term.

As a potter, it’s crucial to me to honour the elements on which this ancient craft has been developed and is informed, first and foremost, before then considering how they might be amplified and augmented by technology and AI. As I’ve said, AI serves the work, not the other way around. This is how it must be for us and our relationship with AI as a whole. Primitive creativity first, followed by digital craft.

Ceramic history represents the longest traceable timeline of human ingenuity and creative practice that the world has ever known and is a powerful social archive. AI can only mimic this.

It’s the role of the ceramic artist to provoke interaction and working with clay is a great way of creating an appreciation for the value of deep involvement and interaction with materials of every nature. It could be easy though to sideline the human and social value of ceramics throughout the ages and forget these traditions in favour of the seductive but as yet unproven prospect of AI as a positive and welcome addition to the potter’s palette and hard won technique.

It is the human capability to make materials of lasting beauty and social value that ceramics represents uniquely, more than any other medium on the planet. It is also the ingenuity and depth of craft and technique that humans are capable of, and that ceramics represent, that will stand us in such critical stead in the future against AI taking over.

As an artist, I am exploring the ideal balance that can be found between human ingenuity, craft, technology and how best to augment what we do with the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.

Potters and ceramicists are makers of social materials that have enhanced human potential since the dawn of human history. This seems to me to be the right time to think about how ceramics and AI working at their best together can enhance humanity’s future direction, also.