This week, I found myself thinking about sentiment as this thread that weaves through all human connection and creation. It started with an NPR video I watched about AI book recommendations gone wrong followed by Ocean Vuong’s Modern Love Podcast Interview and led me to wonder: is our collective unease with AI really just about missing that human touch?
To explore this, I got five five Nigerian creatives across different industries to share their candid thoughts about how they're actually using AI, what concerns they have , and what they wish these tools could solve for them. Their responses revealed something more nuanced than the usual "AI will replace us all" narrative and something that echoes centuries-old philosophical questions about what makes us fundamentally human.
What's Actually Working: The Wins
Seun (Film) has found ChatGPT invaluable as a research assistant that cites sources, something traditional search engines have been failing at. He also uses it for concept development, tools like Runway ML and Google's Veo have helped transform sketches into quick reference videos for team sharing, especially when turnaround times are tight and you need skills immediately. I attended a roundtable last week with mainly teaching founders and investors but one creative person in the room brought up a similar insight; given the barrier of high cost with filmmaking, AI video generator tools help to bridge the gap for film making in developing countries.
Anthony (Architecture) discovered AI's power during a time crunch, feeding basic 3D building images into text-to-image AI to generate "scarily accurate" external visuals when their CGI team couldn't deliver in time. He also uses it for tedious visual tasks in software.
Ore (Journalism) swears by Notebook LM for organising research chaos. She uploads interview recordings, written sources, and notes, then uses it to create mind maps, timelines, and audio overviews. "I feel comforted knowing where all the sources are from because they are my sources," she explains.
Nikki (Publishing) keeps it simple and is mainly using AI for meeting transcriptions and breaking down heavy discussions into actionable data for easy follow-up.
Sarah (Music) admits to "accidentally" using AI through Google integrations but consciously avoids it in her creative work.
The Real Concerns: Beyond Job Displacement
What emerged wasn't just fear of replacement, but a concern about losing the essence of creative work itself.
Seun worries about the erosion of an artist's unique point of view: "When every single person on earth can simply press a button and create a TV show off a prompt, the POV of an artist is not that important." He's noticed the language shift from "artists" to "creators" to "curators" a linguistic slide that mirrors a philosophical one.
Anthony sees his entire profession potentially becoming obsolete within a decade: "At that point, the entire building design process will be lost and you technically won't need architects and designers anymore."
Ore fears the numbing of creativity: "You can't get a chatbot to recreate that unique tone for you. If you think you can, you start relying on it and then you lose your own ability to do that." She's particularly concerned about people "losing the joyful and really fulfilling parts of this job by relying on this to do the best bits."
Sarah captures something essential to her about any creative process: "The great thing about art and creativity is that it just takes the life out of the music... anything that removes the very human imperfections and quirks and spontaneity of creating music, I'm not really a fan of."
Nikki highlights industry specific anxieties around intellectual property and market saturation, particularly with initiatives like Stephen Bartlett's AI novel-writing agency: "What does it mean if we can start crafting stories that resemble an author's voice but aren't theirs?"
What They Actually Want: The Life Admin Gap
Interestingly, most wished for AI assistance in areas far removed from their core creative work:
Administrative Relief: Anthony wants help planning his limited downtime "down to the hour, second even," incorporating life admin, rest, and leisure activities. Sarah wants help maintaining databases of writers, producers, and artists for collaboration purposes.
Workflow Management: Ore wants better workflow management across her various projects but doesn't trust current tools with that much personal information.
Life Admin: Sarah would welcome AI meal planning and recipe organisation: "I hate thinking about what it is I am supposed to eat throughout the day."
Industry Innovation: Seun dreams of AI tools for non-fiction content, documentaries and reality shows, developed "in a way that is of good moral standing."
What struck me most was how they wanted AI to handle the mundane so they could focus on the meaningful. Not to do the creative work for them, but to give them more space for it.
The Philosophy of Mundane Humanity
This desire to outsource the administration while protecting the creative raises a fascinating question: what if the mundane parts of deciding what to eat, organising our schedules, managing our workflows are precisely what makes us human and shouldn't be delegated to a series of AI agents?
This tension would have fascinated the 18th-century philosophers who first grappled with questions of human sentiment and moral judgment. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argued that humans possess a natural capacity for sympathy "our fellow-feeling with any passion whatsoever" that forms the foundation of our moral lives. Smith believed morality emerged not from innate moral sense, but from humanity's natural sociability and our need for approval from our peers.
Could it be that our daily mundane choices of what to cook, how to structure our day, which tasks to prioritise are actually micro-exercises in this fundamental human capacity for moral sentiment? When Sarah struggles with meal planning, she's not just solving a logistical problem; she's engaging in the deeply human act of caring for herself, making choices that reflect her values, preferences, and understanding of her own needs.
David Hume, Smith's contemporary, would likely have found our AI dilemma particularly relevant to his philosophy. Hume argued that moral evaluations depend significantly on sentiment or feeling, and that our actions are motivated by a combination of utility and sentiment. His position was that we can never make moral judgments based on reason alone, a perspective that seems remarkably prescient in our age of algorithmic influenced decision making.
If Hume was right that sentiment, not pure rationality, drives human moral behavior, then perhaps our unease with AI isn't just about job displacement or creative authenticity. Perhaps it's an intuitive recognition that when we outsource our daily choices to algorithms, we're potentially atrophying the very capacity for sentiment based judgment that these philosophers identified as essentially human.
The Mismatch Between Innovation and Personal Need
Yet here's the paradox: while tech companies spend billions developing AI that can write novels and compose symphonies, these working creatives are crying out for tools that can simply organise their calendars, plan their meals, and manage their personal workflows (which by the way all exists in some shape or form even in simple tools like the calendar app and notes app on peoples phones).
There's a fundamental marketing mismatch happening. The AI industry seems obsessed with replacing human creativity when what many humans actually want is help with the unglamorous, time consuming tasks that prevent them from being creative in the first place.
These aren't technical problems that require breakthrough AI capabilities. They're mundane organisational challenges that could dramatically improve quality of life with relatively simple tools. But it simply doesn't sell venture capital or make headlines. "AI Plans Your Dinner" doesn't have quite the same ring as "AI Writes Your Novel."
But perhaps this reveals something important about how we're thinking about AI's role in our lives. The most meaningful applications might not be the ones that make us redundant, but the ones that make us more human by freeing us from the administrative burden of modern life (read as late stage capitalism crushing weight on us all) while preserving our agency in the choices that matter most to our sense of self and moral development.
The Sentiment Question Revisited
This brings me back to that question about sentiment that I asked at the beginning of the audio, now informed by centuries of philosophical inquiry into human nature. After listening to these creators and considering the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume's insights into moral sentiment, I think our AI anxiety isn't just about job security or even creative authenticity it's about preserving what makes us human in our work and daily lives.
The creatives I spoke with aren't anti-technology. They're using AI where it makes sense. But they're also fiercely protective of the parts of their work that require not just intelligence, but wisdom, intuition, and yes, sentiment. They seem to intuitively understand what Smith and Hume articulated: that human moral and creative judgment emerges from our capacity to feel, to empathise, to connect emotionally with our work and with others.
Perhaps the real question isn't whether AI can replicate human creativity, but whether we'll maintain the discernment to know when the human touch matters most and more importantly, whether we'll preserve space for the sentiment based judgment that these philosophers identified as central to human flourishing.
Some of the points raised repeatedly by the creatives which we can all take on as advice isn't to reject AI entirely, but to be thoughtful about where and why we deploy it.
What do you think? Can you boil down your own concerns about AI to this tension between efficiency and sentiment?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on where we should draw these lines. Leave it in the comments below!
Disclaimer: All individuals interviewed for this post spoke in their personal capacity and their views do not represent those of their employers or affiliated organisations.
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