Critical Thought as the New Creative Process in the Age of AI
Reflections on the possible extinction of human creativity by artificial intelligence.
I. What, Not How
This fear exists. But your point of view determines where you go when you drive. So I will speak of a road that I see opening.
Creativity may be moving to a new level, where the limits of your imagination become your creation, directly. Whatever you can imagine, you will be able to show. And that will be your work.
Then you will value someone for the range of their imagination and their capacity for something innovative. Not for how they did it. But for what they did.
This is already happening to some degree. We simply continue to value the process as well — and rightly so, because for centuries process was the only reliable proof that someone had actually done something. And by process we mean any sequence of methodical actions or stages followed to achieve a specific result.
“The limits of your imagination will become your creation, directly. Whatever you can imagine, you will be able to show. And that will be your work.”
II. We Have a Precedent
The invention of photography displaced painting as the medium for recording historical events. For anyone living then, this was the end: one medium did in seconds what the other did in months, and did it more faithfully.
But painting survived. And in fact it grew richer, with theories and ways of seeing we could never have imagined. Freed from the duty of documentation, it went where it would never have gone had it needed to remain reliable. The medium didn’t shrink; it expanded.
In photography, the reverse happened. At first it seemed that the photographer’s eye was enough — that painterly knowledge, the hand, the years of training, were no longer needed. But over time we saw that this eye, too, demands its own specialization, its own discipline, a process both technical and artistic.
In other words: the process wasn’t abolished. Another one was born. And with it, a new space, where we instantly capture every fantasy we have of a place — something painting never gave us. We value a good photograph, and it gives us an aesthetic pleasure borrowed from no other medium.
I believe something analogous will happen, in a great many things, with artificial intelligence.
III. The Presence of Absence
The camera, however much it simplified things, always demanded one non-negotiable thing: someone had to have stood somewhere. In a place, at an hour, with a body, waiting for a light. The machine removed the hand; it did not remove presence. That is why it was able to give birth to a new process: it still had something left to build on.
Artificial intelligence is the first medium that can produce in your absence. You are there only as a judge — and only if you decide to be, and only if you don’t get bored.
If we want to speak seriously about what is at stake, we must first name it correctly. The fundamental quality of the work is not at risk, since neural networks are trained without pause. What we risk is dullness of mind and a loss of enthusiasm for creating something new. The overproduction of artificial intelligence may quickly saturate our creative thirst, since we do nothing beyond judging — which is important, but not thrilling. The creative process of error, of risk, is the adventure our souls need in order to feel alive.
“The overproduction of artificial intelligence may quickly saturate our creative thirst.”
IV. The Process as Therapy
Something else is at risk, and that is exactly where the pity lies: the journey and the process are, through art, therapy.
We don’t make things only to have made them. The hours spent in front of something that isn’t working, the mistake that takes you somewhere else, the repetition that slowly becomes understanding — these are not the cost of the work. They are part of the gain. And it is a gain collected only by the one who went through it.
A therapy is not replaced by a better result. If someone hands me, ready-made, what I would have spent six months making, they gave me the thing and took the six months from me. Depending on what those six months were for me, this can be a gift or a subtraction.
“Repetition that slowly becomes understanding — this is not the cost of the work. It is part of the gain.”
V. What Is at Stake
In painting and photography, the new process arrived almost by itself; the medium demanded it in order to work. Here, what is required is critical thought as the new creative process. Artificial intelligence runs in the background, as long as we direct it. And it is hugely productive.
What we need is the cultivation of critical thought as a creative process.
We are not talking about the one-dimensional judgment of an information consumer, where dullness sets in through saturation; we are talking about the active judgment of a person practicing ethical and aesthetic action, as the evolution of the self and of society.
“The new creative process as critical thought that distinguishes quality, and directs the new through artificial intelligence, is our ethical and aesthetic sharpening.”