The Golden Age of Creativity Is Here (And It’s Powered by AI)

The machine showed me my face today, or rather, what it thought my face should be...

It was early morning in the triangle, that liminal hour when the dew is thick on the grass and inspiration traditionally visits, and I was sitting at my desk watching an artificial intelligence imagine versions of myself I had never considered possible. Young, old, as a Renaissance portrait, as a cyberpunk character, as someone else entirely. The uncanny valley had become my morning routine.?

We tell ourselves stories about creativity, about genius, about the singular moment of inspiration that changes everything. We especially like the stories about solitary artists in their garrets, musicians hearing symphonies in their dreams, writers channeling voices from the ether. These stories comfort us. They suggest that creativity is inherently human, ineffable, beyond the reach of silicon and code.

But the stories are changing.

The question of whether machines can be creative misses the point entirely.

The real question is what it means for us, for our stories, for the ways we understand our own creativity.

• I think about the Renaissance artists who refused to use perspective tools, claiming they were cheating.
• I think about the photographers who were told they weren't real artists because their cameras did the work.
• I think about the synthesizer musicians who were accused of killing real music.

Every generation has its technological anxiety, its fear that the new tools will somehow diminish the human spirit.

But here's what they don't tell you about AI and creativity: it's boring until it isn't. It's all pattern-matching...until suddenly it shows you something that makes your synapses ignite as you recognize a new interesting territory.

Like any good muse, it doesn't give you the answer—it opens a window you didn't see in the first place.

On YouTube, I watched an artist collaborate with an AI to create a series of portraits. She would make a mark, the AI would respond, she would respond to its response. "It's like dancing," she said, "but your partner sometimes has better moves than you do." Critics were debating whether her work could truly be called art. Didn’t they say the same thing about Warhol's screen prints?

The truth is, we're not very good at predicting what will enhance or diminish human creativity. The pencil was once considered a dangerous technology that would rob students of the mental exercise of memorization. The calculator was going to make us forget how to do math. Instead, these tools freed us to think about bigger problems, to push further into the unknown.?

In Silicon Valley, they talk about AI "augmenting" human creativity, as if creativity were something that could be measured and amplified like a signal. But in studios and workshops and garages across the country, artists are discovering something different: AI isn't just augmenting creativity, it's changing what creativity means.

A composer in Los Angeles uses AI to generate hundreds of variations on a theme, each one slightly different. "It's like having an infinite orchestra," he said, "but the orchestra sometimes plays things you never would have thought to write." He doesn't use most of the variations, but the ones that surprise him often lead to new ideas, new directions, new possibilities.

The machines are dreaming now, but they're dreaming in a language we taught them.

Every image they generate, every melody they compose, every story they tell is built from the fragments of human creativity they've been fed. They are mirrors, in a way, reflecting back our own creativity through a lens that distorts and transforms it into something new.

Last night, I asked an AI to show me what creativity looks like. It generated an image of a door opening onto another door, opening onto another door, infinite doors stretching into the distance.

It brought out a wry smile. Not because of some profound understanding it showed, rather the sheer obviousness of the visual analogy.

In the office kitchen of my first ad agency lived a list of overused creative angles that were banned in brainstorms—door and puzzle piece were #1 and #2. AI would have been kicked out of the room. But here’s the rub. It deserves to be in the room.

Creatives thrive in collaboration versus isolation.

Combined thinking opens pathways a lone mind won't uncover. It’s why art directors and copywriters work in pairs. Similarly, the relationship between the digital and analog worker is about augmentation rather than replacement, about the strange and wonderful things that happen when human imagination meets machine learning.

The morning sun is bursting over the trees now. The anxiety about AI replacing human creativity is misplaced. We are not being replaced, we are being revealed.

I think we’re entering a golden age for creativity. Execution is more accessible than ever. Lower costs mean greater opportunity for risk-taking, meaning ideas will rule once again.

Maybe that's what some people have been afraid of all along.