LOS ANGELES, July 2 — A new series is asking a question: can artificial intelligence genuinely create art, or is it just a very fast mimic? The first installment, published online this week, doesn’t offer a tidy yes-or-no answer. Instead, it walks readers through a working definition of creativity itself.
The practical upshot? The author argues that if creativity is about generating something novel and useful, AI can check those boxes.
But the piece also presses on a harder question: is there something irreducibly human about the act of making something new? Think of it like the difference between a chef inventing a recipe and a microwave following one. Both produce a meal.
Only one of them had to taste-test, fail, and adjust.
What the series actually covers
The essay draws heavily on the work of cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, who broke creativity into three flavors: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. The author points out that AI systems today are very good at the first two. They can remix thousands of paintings to produce a new image in the style of Van Gogh.
They can explore the rules of a sonnet and generate passable poetry. But transformational creativity — the kind that invents an entirely new genre, like what Picasso did with Cubism — remains elusive.
The source material puts it plainly: “The system cannot, on its own, decide to break the rules of the sonnet form to invent a new poetic structure.” That decision, the author suggests, still belongs to a human who has a reason to rebel. Here’s what it means for the average person staring at a blank page or canvas. The series doesn’t claim AI is about to replace artists.
It frames the technology more as a collaborator — one that can handle the grunt work of generating options, leaving the human to do the selecting, shaping, and meaning-making. The piece is careful not to overstate the case.
It acknowledges that current AI models are essentially “stochastic parrots,” a term popularized by linguist Emily Bender, meaning they predict the next plausible word or pixel without any understanding of what they’re saying. The author flags this as a real limit, but also wonders aloud whether understanding is even necessary for something to be considered creative. This is just Part 1.
The series promises to dig deeper into the implications for copyright, the economics of creative labor, and what happens when machines start making things that feel genuinely new. For now, the takeaway is a cautious one: AI can be a creator, but not yet the kind of creator that changes what creation means.
Sources
- Is AI the New Creator in the Creative Process? – Psychology Today
- How is AI Changing the Creative Process? AI as the Co-creator …
