Nevertheless, Creativity Survives
Creation is a human instinct. AI is both enabling and threatening creativity. History suggests that human art will endure. We have a choice: to use AI to erase or to extend creativity.
Before we talk about the future of creation, I want to talk about its past.
Poetry was perhaps our original expressive creation: indeed, it is from the Ancient Greek verb ποιεῖν (phonetically: poiein), “to create,” that we get our modern English word “poetry.” Before we had writing, we had poetry. Rhythm followed our heartbeats, rhyme echoed our voices, repetition formed our memories. These devices weren’t just aesthetic—they were also mnemonic, ways of ensuring that poems, and the records of human life they contained, were passed down faithfully.
Poetry is prehistoric, which, if it seems paradoxical for anything existing in the history of time to be pre-historic, means only pre-writing. But if we take it literally that poetry is prehistoric—that it exists somehow outside of time—then it follows that it must also be eternal. The line “poetry makes nothing happen” from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” is often quoted out of context. Indeed, the punctuation mark immediately following that statement is a colon: he is about to explain what he means by that. “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.”
Much else has been written about poetry, and the poet’s job: Yeats said it was “to hold in a single thought reality and justice,” what is and what should be; Wallace Stevens said it was to be “the priest of the invisible,” all that we feel, imagine, believe. It is to record history, bear witness to the present, and intimate the future. It is to try to get it all down.
And what a staggering task that is today—to get it all down! The world as we knew it just a second ago has vanished into obsolescence; times are “unprecedented” over and over again, as though the world is continually clearing its memory and hitting refresh. News cycles pass through us like gusts of wind, misinformation and disinformation pass through us like chills, and it’s hard to tell the difference; trends are blown like bubbles, popping not even before leaving the wand; the world cleaves into two, offline and online, and then into four, augmented and artificial. “You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass,” as Seamus Heaney put it. Or, more recently, as Jorie Graham puts it in the opening poem of To 2040:
Is this a real
encounter I ask. Of the old
kind. When there were
ravens. No
says the light. You
are barely here.
What does it mean to be barely here today?
We are living in an era of algorithmic consolidation. We see the same messages, get the same search results, shop from the same website, are caught in the same cultural snow-slide. Meanwhile, entire fields of knowledge—philosophy, literature, lyric—are dismissed in a culture obsessed with utility and efficiency, and any effort to stake a claim on one’s life—to reclaim stillness, nature, beauty, encounters of “the old / kind”—feels thwarted at every turn. Now we can understand the modern creator. To create is more urgent than ever; and with technology, to create is more possible than ever:
For writers, Substack and Beehiiv are transforming the blog and empowering writers to circumvent traditional publishing channels and write direct-to-consumer.
For readers, Speechify and Eleven Labs are enabling anyone to listen to any text in any voice or language they want. Snoop Dogg is pleased that we can “enjoy listening to the internet in the voice of Snoop Dogg.”
For speakers, Descript and OpusClip are making editing podcasts and videos intuitive and seamless, and in turn making the podcasts and videos themselves accessible to a wider audience through captioning.
For musicians, Suno and AudioShake (Indie, for smaller artists) are enabling artists at all levels to compose and decompose music. I stopped playing the piano in high school, but the other day, I made two instrumentals on Suno, prompting it to capture the simultaneous tragedy and ecstasy of being young and was surprised by their emotional resonance.
For visual artists or simply daydreamers, Midjourney and OpenAI’s Sora (along with many other text-to-video AI applications, such as Pika Labs) allow anyone to turn their ideas into images, still or moving, at once.
Even for physical creators, Arcade AI lets you “turn your thoughts into things” and design jewelry from AI prompting, and Adam CAD lets you “speak anything into existence” and bring natural-language-generated prototypes to life.
Of course, the complete picture of AI’s creative use-cases is not so rosy.
Artists of “the old / kind” fear for their livelihoods, and the future of their crafts. Another name for training data is artists’ work, raising unsettling legal and ethical questions about ownership, plagiarism, and theft. Content that feeds is not the same as content that nourishes; what algorithms know we fall prey to is not the same as what we fall in love with. Just as older generations smoked tobacco before we fully appreciated its dangerous effects, just as my generation consumed social media before we fully appreciated its damaging effects, so too is the next generation of vulnerable youth engaging with AI before we have fully appreciated its deleterious effects.
The release of the Netflix series-adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a timely reminder to us that “time [is] not passing…it [is] turning in a circle.” And as the creator economy itself commoditizes both creation and creator—increasingly blurring the lines delimiting humans, human advertisers, and humanoid advertisements—it is possible for us to lose sight of what it means to be human as an end rather than a means. “Attempting to become more than man we become less,” William Blake wrote, and perhaps prophesied.
But since time is turning in a circle, I return to Márquez for another prediction.
In the middle of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the narrator tells of “the cylinder phonographs that the merry matrons from France brought with them as a substitute for the antiquated hand organs and that for a time had serious effects on the livelihood of the band of musicians.” Sound familiar—an automated innovation threatening human creative production? When I read about the public’s reception, I could hardly breathe, and it’s worth quoting at length:
At first curiosity increased the clientele on the forbidden street…but from so much and such close observation they soon reached the conclusion that it was not an enchanted mill as everyone had thought and as the matrons had said, but a mechanical trick that could not be compared with something so moving, so human, and so full of everyday truth as a band of musicians.
In the case of AI, the mechanical trick relies upon human creation. There are no model outputs without training inputs: AI can generate a pastiche of 17th-century Baroque art only because Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Vermeer dedicated themselves to capturing light and movement and drama. Inasmuch as AI feels like magic, we must endeavor to credit the human marvels underpinning the whole show: credit the invention of the sonnet, credit the improvisations of jazz, credit the hours spent in the darkroom, credit what artists will do next.
We are at a juncture: to use AI to erase and replace, or to use it to aid and augment, to inspire and play.
I suspect that those who try to erase and replace will find public disillusionment at the end of the road as people discover that AI is but another “mechanical trick,” no substitute for human expression. I also suspect that they will fail—that human art will persist, will wriggle its way through the concrete.
But, when used to aid and augment, as a companion to human creation rather than in competition with it, AI can empower anyone and everyone to extend their imagination and share it with others, with text turned into speech, speech turned into text, and one language turned into another.
In other words, AI can empower anyone and everyone, in this deafeningly loud world that hurtles headlong into the future, to create and to pass down, as we’ve always done and always will do. To say I was here, the world I lived in was like this, take it with you. Perhaps not to make anything happen, but to survive.
Marianne Moore wrote a poem called “Nevertheless” that I always return to when the survival of something precious seems dubious:
Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't
harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground.