What is the cost of algorithms on our creativity?
I was lucky to attend the Creativity Conference in New York in June 2023. A full day of panels with disruptors and creators, all coming together to discuss creativity, challenges of the creative process, and creativity in the age of social media and AI.
If you have been reading me for a while now, you know I have a complex relationship with social media. I find the tool interesting, but I am fully against how they have been built and how they work and impact our lives. AI can definitely be useful, but (hence what I just wrote above) if developed and used by the “wrong” crowd, it could be amazingly disastrous.
Back at the conference, one of the talks was called “Creator Strikes Back” and was presented by Matthew Scott from “Play Human.”
Here are a few takeaways I noted from his session:
- Dictatorship of formats on social media: ultimately, they limit our creativity. It’s sad because it’s all about mainstream and money, but we could create new formats.
- Post social media era? What could it look like? Go back to the child who had no screen. It is an open playing field. Remove advertisement, morality, and algorithms control; what and how would creative freedom look like then?!
- Create our own pathways to get out of algorithms, change them, and find a balance between playing the system’s game and getting out of the box.
As you can imagine, this resonated with me a lot. As an independent writer and video director, I face these challenges every day. I need social media to increase my visibility and share my work with the broadest audience. Still, because of its formats and algorithm, social media limits my work and, of course, my creativity. People who are successful on social media nowadays don’t necessarily need talent as long as they have a few marketing skills.
Again, by giving space to artists and creatives, social media can offer them an exposition they could only dream of decades ago. They have more opportunities, and it would seem they have more chances to not rely only on an unfair establishment in the traditional art world. But in reality, they have just integrated a new system with new paradigms and rules. They may not need an acclaimed agent or publisher, but they still need to play according to social media platforms' rules.
To give you an example of the extend of these rules, Franco-German TV station Arte did a documentary on Instagram: “Instagram, la foire aux vanités.”
Their documentary explains that the game changed with Instagram the day it was bought by Meta. Meta opened it to advertisement progressively. A move they made so their investment became profitable. The documentary explains further how it created an Instagram aesthetic: “perfectly produced images like in a professional ads campaign.” But as they added: “the more the accounts were filed with perfect images, the more we lost authenticity.”
At 30.32, an interviewee explains further how luxury brands have evolved because of the algorithms. They had to simplify their products to the extreme, so their products are “instagramable.” Many of these brands also ditched their traditional collections and products to focus on sweatshirts, sneakers, or any flatter product that is easier to be photographed and shared online.
If it impacts the way luxury brands work, it also has the same effect on any creator and artist.
To play by these rules comes at a price, as argued by Nicolas Kayser Bril, a writer, and journalist who explains (34.31):
“Indeed, we notice that Instagram today suggests predominantly images that are fed by soft porn, a standardization of bodies that are extremely identical.”
Whatever we want to share online, our bodies, products, or our latest vacations, because we crave the likes and the following, we mainly comply and post what has already proven to be working online. The consequence? All the feeds are similar, and we all scroll through the same aesthetics and photos, listening to the same reels’ audio again and again and liking bikinis bodies all day long.
“We did a study on the Instagram algorithm, we found that photos of men and women in swimsuits were shown much more frequently than photos of landscapes or food.”
To quote another article on this standardization:
“But faced with this avalanche of new visual forms – from lolcats to brainlets – allowed by the ability of each person to be at the same time source of images and influencer, the art world has lost its own influence power. We have observed a loss of autonomy in art, and even more so in the art world, which is no longer ahead of its time and, on the contrary, struggles to follow somehow this frantic rhythm of saturation with pictures,” notes Grégory Chatonsky.
Research has been done, and experts have discussed this repeatedly: it’s factual how Instagram operates and how it has been designed. Take it from the mouth of the people who built it.
In terms of creativity and as pointed out by Matthew in his presentation, social media, because of their rules, algorithms, and formats, limit artists’ creativity and favor content creators who are a source of revenue for the platform itself.
Once again, if there were no algorithms, likes, comments, and money to make online, would all these women share so many selfies and photos of themselves half-naked? Would luxury brands change the way they create collections and products? Would any creator create according to its creative pulse or according to what the algorithm desires? What would our content look like?
Most would argue their bodies/accounts/arts/performances, their choices, but remove the algorithm and its financial benefits and let’s see how many people still post the exact same content. It can’t be an empowered choice when you are submitted to a system and an algorithm.
So maybe they feel freer because they are directly in touch with their audiences, but as long as they don’t play by the algorithm’s rules, their creation and lives remain restricted.
What I found genuinely inspiring in Matthew’s presentation - and it was indeed his main argument - was that the power is still in the hands of the creators. He said: “we can create new social media platforms.” Indeed, we could. It’s a straightforward thought and evident argument, but as a creator, to be reminded that nothing is fixed was truly invigorating. Maybe we are at a stage of our career where we can’t do without these platforms, and maybe we will have to buy a few ads, but there is always another way, and we can contribute to building the next generation of platforms for artists and creators.
Nothing will ever beat authenticity. Algorithms don’t favor authenticity, and for this reason, they are doomed to be temporary. So how does this translate in our creative realms? It’s giving ourselves the freedom to create again. It’s always thinking of what our creations would look like if we were only creating from a genuine place where we favor our essence over likes and vanity.
This newsletter has been my main focus this year. I have a small community of readers, and I work hard to reach new ones. While my existing community is small, I still have solid stats; my opening rate is high compared to the average on the platform. Of course, my goal is to increase my readership, but what would be the point of having millions of subscribers if none of them would actually open my newsletter?
I know that to increase my readership, I would need to change my titles to something less literary, more marketed, and clickable. I would need to share much more on social media than I already do and use the format (reels at the moment) the platform wants me to use when they want me to use it.
One could argue it would be a good creativity exercise to promote a newsletter through a reel; others would simply think that it is a waste of time to try to comply with formats just for the sake of using them.
For now, I find it extremely dull and fake. I know that at some point, I'll have no other choice if I want to move on to the next level but to play the platforms' game.
However, as Matthew said, balance is essential. I believe in what I write. Because of that, I am ready to compromise in order to make my work seen as much as I believe it deserves. To the limit I don't lose myself and sacrifice my integrity.
As a creator you may find yourself in the same situation. We are in this together and it’s good to remind ourselves that we can be at peace when something doesn’t resonate with millions of followers. It doesn't always mean our creations suck. Sometimes, it only means it is not algorithm's friendly, which are two very different things.
So how can you support artists and creators around you to give them the extra push they don't get organically from the algo?
Whatever they are creating, please play by the platforms' rules, and within the first hour of them sharing something: save, share, comment, like, repost, etc.
It is truly a game-changer. Sometimes you may not resonate too much with a creation or every single post you see, but the algorithm needs consistency, so we must interact and engage with artists' content every time to keep pushing them.
As a fellow creator, how can you use these platforms for what they are: promotion tools, and still get the freedom you deserve in your creativity?
Balance. Find help if you don't have enough time to engage online with your community. Stay authentic, the road may take you longer, but in the end, it is the only road that will lead to building a solid community of supporters loving your craft wholeheartedly.