Am AI Creative?

Can AI be creative? For better or worse, the answer is yes, AI can be creative.

Let’s take a moment to deconstruct what it means to create. As Merriam-Webster tells us, to create is “to bring into existence.” Well, AI can certainly do that. It can certainly make things that weren’t there before.

Of course, being creative isn’t just about making things. A machine mass-producing plastic bottles is making things all day long, but we wouldn’t call that creative. When we think about creative processes, we usually think about making something new. Something unique that hasn’t existed before.

Again, AI passes this test as well. AI can easily make things that are entirely new. Ask it to write a paragraph on any topic and with near certainty, it will generate a sequence of words that have never been arranged in that order before. The same is true for AI-generated images.

Still, being creative is more than about making something unique. Software has been able to do this for decades. It only takes a few lines of code to generate a sequence of random words or an image of randomly positioned shapes. Being creative is about making something unique that is relevant to humans, to human culture, and to our forms of expression.

Well, AI can do this too. In fact, AI’s are specifically trained to be relevant to humans, to our culture and to our forms of expression. By default, AI’s write in prose (as the normative form), but they can just as easily write sonnets or limericks or rap lyrics. This is exactly why they are so useful and so popular.

Despite all of this, we hold onto something more. Something that we cherish in our concept of creativity. A certain “je ne sais quoi?” Something that seems uniquely human. That thing, which is impossible to pin down, is the experience of being human, of living a life never lived before, of making something new from the facets of our lived experiences.

By definition, AI cannot do this. It hasn’t lived a human life and it never will. That said, one may argue that AI has lived a million lives vicariously. It has read every book. It has seen every piece of artwork. It has watched every movie and visited every place on Earth. And so, it creates from the facets of its “lived” experience, and what it creates is unique in its own way. Just like us.

Jared Schiffman is Director of Creative Technology at Schema, a research and design firm based in Seattle and New York City.