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I thought that with the rise of artificial intelligence, the mundane and boring jobs would be the first to be replaced, freeing the human beings stuck in these fields and giving them the opportunity to pursue their purpose in life, express their creativity and find meaning. 

Just like when the robots took over the work in factories and replaced thousands of humans who would do these simple tasks. 

It turns out that AI is able to do a lot of analytical work, data science etc much faster than a human ever could. But what I didn’t expect was that it would take over the “creative” fields too. Images, music and videography are now all able to be done by AI – almost indistinguishable from human made content. I agree that a lot of these “creations” lack depth and one can spot artificially made content quite quickly if one has the eyes and ears that find the flaws, but we often forget a very important aspect to this: What we are now seeing will be the worst AI content ever. It will only get better and better over time. And if we’re not specifically looking for flaws, a lot of AI content might go unnoticed already. 

Yet I do feel that the rise of AI offers an opportunity to challenge our thinking about what creativity actually is and this is what I want to talk about. Because a profound understanding of true creativity can set us apart from the machines that merely copy what we’ve “created” in the past, thus giving us a better understanding of who we are as humans.

Usually, we have an idea of what creativity is. We learn that idea from teachers, school and society. We learn that humans are creative and learn that music, paintings, photography etc. are expressions of that creativity. But we never question that. We never stop and ask ourselves “What even is creativity?”. We make a mistake that we so often make. We overlook that the word is never the thing. The word creativity is not creativity itself. But if we live on words, then creativity is a word that can be described with other words. Then we learn to know what creativity is, based on explanations, definitions and such. But the word is not the thing. 

Here’s a suggestion on how to approach it: Creativity can never be brought about by thought and knowledge! If it was brought about by thought and knowledge, then creativity lies in the field of the past, therefore it becomes mere repetition of what’s already there. Everything then is a remix, everything is merely a novelty, but never new. This is exactly the reason why AI is becoming so good at imitating our “arts” – they are all but regurgitations of regurgitations. Formulas that work are being endlessly repeated, melodies that were hits 20 years ago become reused today in order to make more profit on them. Taking risks is a no-no in the modern music industry. There simply is no creativity involved in 99% of the music released today. That is also why I never understood why we would call it “artificial intelligence” and not “artificial thought”, as thought and intelligence are two completely different things. 

Anyway, the question then becomes: is it possible to have a mind that is free from the known, free from the past and therefore from thought so that creation can happen in that mind? 

This is something that everyone has to figure out for themselves. To understand thought, knowledge and its limitations, through that to find an end to knowledge (in the sense of a consummation of thought, not in the sense of a terminus), and from there to move free from knowledge in a field free from the limitations of time – that should come first, creation then comes naturally. 

In the end, I’m looking forward to what is going to come. I feel that AI music will replace all the trash music that’s being put out and in turn make room for real human creativity. There will always be bands of musicians that create from that space, where thought and knowledge do not enter and yet are being used as tools to express creativity.