Creativity After AI
By FORREST ZENG ‘26
Intelligence has always been human. Through neurons and synapses, humans absorb problems, think about them, rearrange them, and spit those inputs out into solutions. In this way, humans are intelligent. They can quickly and efficiently transform something learned into something outputted—be it a plan, a thought, or a physical reaction.
Artificial intelligence endeavors to translate this process into a computer. Instead of axioms, AI uses wires. Instead of biological neurons, AI uses machine learning nodes. Instead of enzymes and chemicals, AI uses light-speed electrical charges. Artificial intelligence transforms an input into an output digitally. AI is humanity’s attempt to transfer its intelligence onto a machine—and it does it very well. This is artificial intelligence.
Creativity, on the contrary, is different from intelligence. Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to make original, innovative, even unusual ideas, often in the form of art. But how exactly does creativity happen?
Notice that after you read a section of Shakespeare or look at enough Van Gogh paintings, you can magically imitate Shakespeare’s style or Van Gogh’s strokes, albeit roughly. And if you study, perform, and listen to enough Mozart, you might hear yourself subconsciously humming tunes that sound like Mozart. Or perhaps after listening to a few hours of Dr. Martin Luther King’s great orations, you might find yourself speaking like Dr. King quite intuitively. What’s happened here is, I propose, twofold: creative absorption, and creative rearrangement. In other words, by consuming art, you absorb “particles”—perhaps a very short musical phrase, or maybe a rhetorical rhythm, even a general mood—and then you rearrange them in a way that imitates the original creator. All of this happens subconsciously and intuitively, and it is what makes the human brain so magical.
However, with this logic, nothing really “new” is created. This model of creativity suggests that particles are just circulated among artists, being chopped and glued together in our minds. Really, these ideas are semi-novel ideas. Like a structural isomer in chemistry, particles might be arranged differently, but really, the particles are all the same.
So how in the world can art ever progress? How do people imagine new things? There must be some other source of artistic “particles” that explain why art evolves. Or else, art remains just a myriad of colors being ever distorted by time. I propose that the other source of inspiration that artists have is life itself. There is a granular complexity to life and nature. This complexity subconsciously inspires every artist, writer, musician, and thinker. How a painter feels one day influences what they create. How a pianist sits, perhaps the weather outside, or a conversation that has been lurking in their subconscious for some time, are all sources for completely novel ideas. This source, external to any musical score or essay, is the source of all novel, revolutionary art.
Artificial intelligence, at the moment, attempts to create art by imitating human creations. When programmers create an artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, they train it on a massive dataset of literature, collected from the internet. Essentially, AI copies other human creations. After being fed trillions of artistic particles, it can rearrange them in ways that haven’t been seen before, it can paint things that haven’t been painted before, and it can write things that haven’t been written before. But is it truly new? No, artificial intelligence does not truly have unlimited creativity. It doesn’t intelligence have any capability to make something more than just a semi-novel rearrangement of artistic particles. It can’t impart the beauty of life into new, fresh artistic ideas. This means that artificial intelligence, or rather, artificial creativity, is only semi-novel.
The question with AI that many people ask is if it will eventually be smarter than humans. In other words, whether AI will be able to solve problems better than humans. This question, I believe, has already been answered, and it is a clear and resounding yes. A few decades ago, we believed that AI could never beat a chess master, nor would it ever be able to write essays and books, or imitate the human voice. But, as we have seen with ChatGPT, the chess program Deep Blue, and modern deepfake programs, to name a few, there is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence will soon parallel or even surpass the brain of Homo Sapiens in its speed and efficiency of solving problems.
I believe the question isn’t whether AI will become more intelligent, but whether it will be more creative. To be clear, the real question is whether creativity can ever be artificial, whether truly breathtaking art can ever be fit in a processor, and whether world-changing novel creations could ever arise from transistors. A computer doesn’t live to produce new things. It lives only to imitate old ones.
So what does this mean for creativity as a whole? If the way we choose to be “creative” is by the processor, then there will be no novelty. There will be no next Mozart. There will be no Hegel’s dialect. There will be no art. All that artificial intelligence can do is spit out recreations and rearrangements of the same old thing.
Imagine a world where people read books, listen to music, and look at images that are only produced by AI. There’s no need for people to learn writing if they can manipulate an AI to imitate Mark Twain himself. There’s no need for people to learn instruments if they can tell an AI to write Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. There’s no need for people to learn how to paint or do graphic design if an AI can imitate Picasso to the smallest detail. Because for most users, novelty isn’t necessary. All they need is something that works. For the first time, people will no longer need to be creative.
The advent of artificial creativity can be compared to the advent of writing. Before writing came about, people remembered stories through memory. The Illiad, a Greek epic of thousands of lines, was passed down purely through memory and speaking. When writing came about, there was no need to remember things anymore. Therefore, the human faculty of memory became weak, because it wasn’t used.
Just like memory, human creativity will weaken due to artificial creativity. Writing was a substitute for memory. So memory was no longer needed. But unlike memory, artificial creativity isn’t a substitute for true creativity. Only true creativity can spin the pedals of art, of writing, of history itself. And true creativity only comes from humanity, because only man can reflect the intricacy of life onto truly novel ideas.
This is a romantic idea. The idea that, amidst the chaotic progression of artificial creativity, humanity will stand as a concrete pillar of true creativity, appeals to us. However, this fact implies a horrible consequence: creativity will become an elitist skill, reserved for a separate socio-economic class of artists.
Artificial intelligence needs to imitate human creations. That necessitates new human art, and therefore, human artists. Normally, these artists would come from all walks of life and all parts of society. Humans are inherently creative. That’s why there is such a diversity of artistic styles and ideas across the world. However, in the future, when we don’t need to be creative anymore, the diversity of artists will decrease. True artists will become sequestered into a minority that holds a valuable skill no other human has. This idea—the degeneracy and sequestering of creativity—is horrifying in itself. Art is all about diversity. With AI, there’s no need for diversity.
This horrible possibility is exacerbated by the fact that this elitist class of “artists” are the ones producing the training data for everyday AI. In other words, everyday AI is imitating this elitist class of “artists.” Therefore, the art that people retrieve from generative AIs will be the ideas and styles of these elite artists and only the ideas of these artists. As it is now, any person could still create novel and interesting ideas that would be impactful on the art scene as a whole. There is still the chance to be creative. With AI, the ideas of common art will be dictated by this single minority class of people. To have a single, minority class of people who control the progression of ideas, is to have a recipe for disaster. Even though this life is an absurdity now, if artificial intelligence as a means of producing “art” is allowed to continue pervading society, this may very well soon be a reality.
After a new technology is introduced into society, there is almost always someone who resists it. Historically, people have found ethical, philosophical, economic, and political reasons to oppose new technologies. And historically, these people have always been proven wrong.
Regardless of how arrogant I may seem, I truly believe that soon, artificial intelligence will present a massive existentialist danger to creativity.
