Why AI Can’t Replace Human Creativity Or Our Need To Create
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(OPINION) It’s 2 a.m., and I’m missing the company of daytime. The more I try to sleep, the more awake I am. No way I’m sleeping now.
My brain is busy when it shouldn’t be, and this is not the time to make big decisions or let random memories skitter like scorpions in my mind. I rather like the ancient mammalian trait — the ability to forget — that allows a person to survive in the form of sanity.
My 2 a.m. brain is thinking about the transformational nature of temporal limits and my contract with time. Of all the waiting terrors, the nearest is always the evidence of time — the destruction, degeneration and decay.
The ethic of reciprocity is the most absurd thing there is in an eroding world. Who denies that a canyon is the story of water? What is the soil I walk on but memories of vanished lands and seas and forests and the “progess” that unmade them? The nature of the world is transformation and change.
To remain the same — to refuse to change — invites degeneration. Extinction records are full of the unadaptable, and this matches my aversion to religious orthodoxy. History is populated with extinct gods and followings unable to change, to make sense and to remain relevant. Today’s myths are the remains of yesterday’s truths.
I’m thinking that the antidote to the eroding nature of this world is not the austerity of orthodoxy, it is the generosity of art. At this time when I should be dreaming, I want to shout out to the dreamers, those who can’t stop creating things, the box-busting thinkers and people who nurture diverse ideas only to discover what is unique: their individual self-expression. Creatives and makers are the true heroes in the world.
For some, creating is therapy and to this I relate. Nobody is more anxious about unwritten words than me. I’m fierce to protect my time to write. Fierce enough to wake up at 2 a.m. to write about it. What can I do but go with it?
Creators often describe making art as a spiritual experience or practice, like a collaboration or communion between the divine and the artist. Ancient Greeks believed artists channeled disembodied muses; Romans called these muses geniuses. I confess I have no muses or geniuses, no divine sparks, but I’m open to them. Until then, I’ll simply enjoy the results with those who spiritualize it.
Call it God’s work, if you must, but a world without art is a world without humans. Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde knew it, “What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”
I took a short course on artificial intelligence to keep abreast of the developing world and was unsurprised to learn that a machine is not “intelligent.” AI is a content gleaner, and there’s always the risk of gleaned garbage (no offense to dumpster divers).
AI struggles to produce unflawed visual art (it’s the tangents), and once you see the tangential problem, you can’t unsee it — like carob for chocolate or chicory for coffee, one taste and you know it’s not the real thing.
In a way, machines are all the same, while humans are unique. AI cannot replace the fingerprint that is a human creator. Art will tell the future everything, that there is value in human creations if only to maintain the line that defines us, human from machine.
Years ago now, I walked along a neighborhood elementary school sidewalk where a young genius left a small composition using leaves and bark and pebbles, small things brought together just so.
And I was there for it, doubly fortunate for the impermanence. I received the communication, the authentic human connection, the recognition of a drive to create as our human transformational nature. It moves me still.
I like to think that my creative efforts as a shoring up against attrition, that future sifters of my life will find something of value and that AI will glean nothing but good garbage from me.
Sleep isn’t welcome now. I’m brewing something rooted in etymology about the word “inspiration” meaning life and its opposite “expiration” meaning, well, death. There is the power of a prefix. But that will be for a different 2 a.m. because it’s now early-riser o’clock, and I have a contract with a pressing temporal limit I call my life.
This piece is republished with permission from FāVS News.
Janet Marugg is an avid gardener, reader and writer living in Clarkston, Washington, with her husband, Ed, and boxer dog, Poppy. She is a nature lover, a lifelong learner and a secular humanist. She can be reached at janetmarugg7@gmail.com.