The essay that landed online this week didn’t start with a question about art. It started with a question about cooking. Can you call a microwave a chef?
It can produce a meal. It follows instructions.
But it never tasted anything. It never burned a batch and started over. That distinction — between following and inventing — is the core of a new series now running online.
The first installment, published July 2 out of Los Angeles, sidesteps the easy yes-or-no on whether AI creates art. Instead, it builds a working definition of creativity.
The author leans heavily on cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, who split creativity into three kinds: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. Here is where the argument gets concrete. AI systems today are good at the first two.
Give one thousands of paintings, and it will remix them into a new image that looks like Van Gogh. Give it the rules of a sonnet, and it will generate passable poetry. The author calls that grunt work.
The machine can generate options. It can explore a known form.
But transformational creativity — the kind that invents an entirely new genre — remains out of reach. The source material is blunt on this point: “The system cannot, on its own, decide to break the rules of the sonnet form to invent a new poetic structure.” That decision still belongs to a human who has a reason to rebel. This matters because the conversation around AI and art has been noisy.
Headlines swing between panic and hype. The series pushes back against both.
It does not claim AI is about to replace artists. It frames the technology as a collaborator. One that handles the boring part — generating options — and leaves the human to do the actual deciding.
The essay draws a line between novelty and intention. A machine can produce something new. But newness alone is not creativity.
The chef who invents a recipe had to taste-test, fail, and adjust. The microwave just follows.
Both produce a meal. Only one of them went through the mess of making something that did not exist before. That mess is the part the series keeps returning to.
The human act of making involves failure. It involves choosing to break the rules.
Picasso did not stumble into Cubism by accident. He had a reason to abandon perspective. He had a point to make.
The author suggests that kind of rebellion is what separates the human from the machine. For the average person staring at a blank page or canvas, the practical upshot is less dramatic than the headlines suggest. The series does not predict a future where artists are obsolete.
It describes a present where AI can handle the grunt work of generating options. The human still has to pick one.
Still has to decide what it means. Boden’s three flavors of creativity give the argument a framework. Combinational creativity mixes existing ideas.
Exploratory creativity works within a set of rules. Transformational creativity changes the rules themselves.
AI can do the first two. The third remains stubbornly human. The series does not pretend to have a tidy answer.
It walks through the definitions, lays out the limits, and leaves the reader with a distinction that is harder to dismiss than a simple yes or no. The microwave can cook dinner. That does not make it a chef.
