Have you ever looked up into the clouds and seen a dog, or a circus tent, and then a fatter dog? OK, so maybe it wasn’t dog, tent, dog – but you get the picture. A fleeting masterpiece sculpted by the wind. But who’s the artist? The atmosphere? Physics? Or is it you, your brain hardwired to find meaning, to paint pictures on the canvas of nature’s chaotic systems? Hold that thought because we’re about to lob a similar conundrum into the hallowed halls of “Creativity”—with a capital C.
“Creativity” isn’t some divine spark, some mystical essence emanating solely from our carbon-based brains; it’s an emergent property of the interaction between an artefact and an interpreter. Therefore, whether the work was created by a human brain or an AI system becomes less important once someone actually experiences it and the creative interaction begins.
The “Human Essence” Myth in Creativity
For centuries, we’ve clung to the idea that creativity is our thing. That creativity is a uniquely human trait, the sole domain of Homo sapiens. It’s the “soul,” the “passion,” the “tortured genius” wrestling with a muse. This narrative is deeply ingrained, a comforting bedtime story we tell ourselves about our own specialness. We see it in the reverence for the lone artist, the auteur, the singular visionary. It’s closely related to the idea of the creative genius myth – that romantic notion of the lone, often eccentric, individual touched by a divine spark, pulling masterpieces out of thin air as if by magic. This myth conveniently minimises the frequently messy, iterative, and even collaborative realities of creation, and crucially, it sidelines the active role of the audience in co-creating meaning. It’s also made teaching very hard because it needs to be somewhat deprogrammed, but I digress.
That creativity is the domain of people is compelling story, for sure. It’s sold a lot of gallery tickets and turned average talent into creative professionals. But, like many deeply cherished beliefs, it’s hubristic at best and prideful and ignorant at worst when we ignore the mechanics of how we actually experience creativity. The “mystique of the human spark” is a powerful cultural narrative, but is it a logical necessity for aesthetic value or the perception of creativity? Nope.
Shifting Focus to Reception
The idea that the audience plays a vital role in creating meaning has been kicking around cultural theory for decades. As a turn-of-the-millemium university student, I’ll gladly guide you to Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author.”, and I’ll save you some pain. Barthes’s central point is that once a work is out in the world – be it a novel, a film, a song, or yes, even a snappy piece of ad copy – the author’s intentions, their biographical details, their favourite roast of coffee? They cease to be the sole arbiters of meaning. The text (or creative thing) becomes a “tissue of quotations,” and the interpretation is generated, vibrantly and uniquely, at the point of reading, viewing, or listening. That is, it’s up to you, the consumer, to find it good, or bad, or well, whatever.
Wimsatt and Beardsley were already poking this particular bear back in the ‘40s with the “Intentional Fallacy,” arguing that hunting for authorial intent is neither truly possible nor even desirable for judging a work’s value. Let’s be brutally honest: from an economic standpoint, an artwork’s financial worth is profoundly influenced by its market audience.
Now, let’s talk about provenance. Knowing the ‘who, how, and when’ behind a work – that’s provenance. It explains why, as someone who lived in Paris, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the real business of France was to export Frenchness to the world. Provenance is the backstory, the human connection, the fingerprint of a specific time and maker. And yes, this story can be compelling. It shapes how we value things, both culturally and economically; it anchors a piece in history and can even be a source of deep personal connection for an audience. We’re often drawn to the narrative of the creator, their struggles, their insights, and their unique journey. This connection to the human element, to the story behind the art, isn’t something to be brushed aside lightly; it often enriches our understanding and appreciation.
However, and this is where it gets interesting for our main argument, while provenance provides a crucial frame and a rich layer of context, the actual spark of perceived creativity —the ‘aha!’ moment —still ignites in the interaction between the work and the person experiencing it. The story of who made it can deeply inform and guide our interpretation, absolutely. But the final, personal experience of finding something ‘creative’ – that’s still cooked up in the messy, glorious, and deeply individual kitchen of our own minds, within our own interpretive community. So, provenance adds a vital, often cherished, chapter to the book, but it’s the end consumer who ultimately brings the story to life in their own experience.
Art History’s Clues
Artists themselves have often been the first to dynamite the pedestal we put them on. Think of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. A urinal thrown in a gallery. The “art” wasn’t in the masterful sculpting of porcelain. He bought it, and recontextualised it as a “readymade”. The creative act was the re-framing, the audacious contextual shift that forced a new way of seeing. You, the viewer, recoiling or ruminating, completed that creative circuit.
Then there’s John Cage’s 4’33”. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of… silence. Or is it? It’s the ambient sounds of the concert hall, the rustling programmes, the nervous coughs, the distant siren – all framed as music. Cage didn’t “compose” the silence; he created a context where the act of listening itself became the performance. The audience became the orchestra. Although I hear that that vinyl version is much less ideologically pure, thanks to the crackle…
And consider Brian Eno and the birth of ambient music. The story goes that Eno was laid up in a hospital after an accident. A friend put on a record of 18th-century harp music, but the amplifier was so quiet, and one speaker was broken, that the music became almost indistinguishable from the sound of the rain outside. Eno, unable to get up and adjust it, experienced it differently: the music wasn’t a distinct entity demanding attention but rather a subtle tint to the existing sonic environment. This wasn’t about a meticulously crafted composition in the traditional sense; it was about creating a space for listening, where the environment and the listener’s state of mind were as much a part of the “music” as the notes themselves. The creative experience emerged from that interplay in the mind of the listener.
The Mind of the Beholder
Cognitive science offers some rather compelling insights here. Our brains are, in essence, funny little prediction machines. We constantly generate models of the world and then update them based on sensory input. This is predictive processing in a nutshell: the brain isn’t passively receiving reality; it’s actively hallucinating its most probable version of it, and sensory data simply prunes and corrects.
Think about pareidolia – seeing faces in clouds, the “man in the moon,” or even Jesus on a piece of toast. That pattern isn’t in the toast. It’s imposed by your brain’s highly evolved, very enthusiastic facial recognition software. You project structure onto randomness and you do it all the time. You can’t help but do it. The Rorschach inkblot is the classic clinical exploitation of this. The “meaning” is entirely supplied by the observer’s internal models, their history, their anxieties, and their preferences.
So, when we encounter something novel yet coherent – a surprising chord progression, an unexpected plot twist, a visually arresting image – and we get that little jolt, that “Aha!” moment, what’s happening? It’s often the satisfying click of pattern completion in our minds. Our predictive models have been playfully violated and then elegantly resolved. This appreciation, this feeling of encountering “creativity,” is mainly independent of the creator’s identity or even their species of origin. It’s about the little playful dance between the stimulus and our own cognitive framework.
Generative AI: The Modern Cloudscape
Right, let’s wade into the current digital maelstrom: Generative AI. This is where the traditionalists often start clutching their pearls. “But AI can’t really be creative! It’s just complex mimicry! It has no soul!” It’s like a remix of a very old and tired song.
I propose that we view these generative models – your Midjourneys, your SORA, and your Claude Sonnets – as incredibly sophisticated structured noise fields. They’ve ingested unfathomable amounts of human-generated data (our collective “cloud,” if you will) and learned the patterns, styles, and underlying grammar of image, text, and sound. When you, the “expert human prompter” (a role that is itself a creative act of curation and direction, let’s be clear), interact with these models, you’re not passively receiving a finished artwork. You are, in effect, cloud-gazing at an much more complex and responsive sky.
You guide the “noise,” you select, you refine, you interpret. You are performing that crucial act of pattern-matching, declaring “creative!” upon discovering a novel and coherent output that resonates with your aesthetic and conceptual frameworks. The AI provides a new kind of canvas, a new kind of collaborator, and perhaps even a new kind of Rorschach test. But the final declaration of “creativity,” the experience of it, still happens in the human interpreter’s mind. The prompter is the first interpreter, the audience the next. It’s an interaction loop, and the AI is just one point in that circuit.
Is the “artist” the AI, the user who wrote the prompt, or the final audience member who finds personal meaning in the generated image? The answer is probably a messy, collaborative “all of the above,” further dissolving that myth of the lone genius.
OK, It’s Not Quite That Simple..
Now, before you accuse me of utopian (or dystopian, depending on your mood) oversimplification, let’s acknowledge some necessary counterarguments and nuances. This isn’t about throwing (my currently 16-month-old) baby out with the bathwater or pretending all creative artefacts are born equal.
Provenance Pragmatism: Yes, in the nuts and bolts of the art market and copyright law, creator identity matters. Hugely. We need to know who “owns” a work for commercial transactions and legal frameworks. Scarcity, often tied to a specific human creator, frequently dictates value. This is an economic reality, but it’s distinct from the experience of creativity.
Process Ethics & the “Struggle”: There is an argument to be made that the intentional struggle, human effort, and lived experience poured into a work imbue it with a certain moral or conceptual weight. The “sweat equity” of creation. An AI, iteratively optimising towards a prompt, doesn’t “struggle” in the human sense. This is a valid point, especially when considering the ethical implications of training data and the displacement of artists. But does the absence of that human struggle automatically negate the possibility of the audience experiencing the output as creative? I’d say no.
Relational Rituals & Live Arts: In fields such as improvisational theatre, live music, or dance, the co-presence of human agents, the liveness, and the shared risk and vulnerability are undeniably part of the aesthetic experience. The humanity of the performers is central to the experience. AI might simulate a performance, but it cannot, as yet, replicate that specific inter-subjective frisson of live, embodied human interaction. This is a different flavour of creativity, one where the process and the presence are inextricably linked to the product.
These are important considerations, not deal-breakers, for the core argument. They add texture, but that doesn’t prove me wrong.
Creativity is a Participatory Sport, Not a Spectator One
So, where does this leave us communication professionals, storytellers, and meaning-makers in an age of increasingly sophisticated silicon collaborators?
It means we need to shift our focus. Creativity isn’t a magic potion brewed in a human skull; it’s an event, an interaction, a spark that flies between the work and an interpreter. The origin story of that artefact—whether sketched by a hand, coded by an algorithm, or prompted into existence via a generative model—is becoming a secondary concern once it enters that interpretive arena.
The power, the meaning, the “aha!” still resides in the human act of reception, of pattern-matching, of finding resonance. Systems can certainly elicit these responses. But we remain the dreamers looking up, the ones who decide what we see, and the ones who imbue it with the label “creative” and separate it from the noise.
Perhaps the real question isn’t if AI-assisted artefacts can be part of the creative landscape but how we adapt our understanding of creativity to embrace this new, incredibly potent form of interaction. It’s a future that, ironically, thanks to these complex computer systems, might push us to be even more attuned to the human act of interpretation itself. I’m OK with that.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I see a particularly compelling cloud outside my window… it looks like a cup of coffee, which seems like an excellent idea.