Jeffrey Katzenberg on human creativity

Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks, has written about the relationship between AI and creativity, drawing on his experience spanning Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

His central argument is that we need to distinguish between reasoning and creativity.

AI is becoming extraordinarily capable at reasoning: analysing information, evaluating options, optimising and recognising patterns. Creativity is different. It starts with a blank page where there is no single correct answer. It involves taste, intuition, imagination, empathy and the desire to communicate something.

For now, Katzenberg argues, those things remain fundamentally human. He places the arrival of AI within a much longer history of technological disruption.

When recorded music arrived, musicians feared for their livelihoods – and many were right to do so. When sound came to cinema, thousands of musicians who had performed live alongside silent films lost their jobs. But sound also created entirely new disciplines and possibilities: movie musicals, film scores, sound effects, sound design and audio engineering.

The same happened with animation.

During Katzenberg’s time at Disney, traditional animation involved as many as 125,000 individually drawn and painted cels for a single film. Disney eventually worked with Pixar to develop digital production technology that transformed the process.

The technology didn’t remove creativity. It changed the tools available to creative people and allowed them to do things that had previously been impossible.

For Katzenberg, the lesson is that tools are never the point.

The instruments used by creative people have always changed. What survives those changes is taste, imagination and the ability to make an audience feel something.

AI should therefore be viewed as another significant change in the creative toolkit rather than creativity itself.

But embracing the technology does not mean ignoring its consequences. Previous technological revolutions displaced real people and real jobs. Katzenberg argues that the important debate around AI should therefore be about the terms on which it is used.

Creative work should be recognised through consent, credit and compensation. His message to technology companies is simple: build AI with storytellers, not on top of them.

At the same time, he believes creative industries need to accept that AI is not going away. Rather than spending all their energy resisting it, creatives should help determine how it is used.

The people who learn to wield these new tools may ultimately use them in ways their inventors never anticipated.

Technology can provide extraordinary new capabilities, but technology alone doesn’t decide what is worth making.

That still requires human judgement.

As George Lucas puts it: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”

In summary