Redefining Creativity – It’s Not What You Create, But How and Why You Create

The Blue Ribbon on Trial

At the 2022 Colorado State Fair, the first-place winner in the digital art category, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” amazed everyone with its dazzling and dreamlike beauty. However, one statement from the artist Jason Allen quickly turned admiration into shock and anger: “I did not pick up a brush. This work is a collaboration with AI Midjourney.”

This incident went beyond a mere happening and posed a profound question about the essence of creativity to the world. Allen argued that he refined hundreds of prompts and spent dozens of hours selecting and retouching to achieve the perfect image. To him, AI was just a cutting-edge “brush” realizing his vision. But many artists were outraged not by his “effort” but by the omission of the “process.” Skipping the sacred process of years of training, wrestling with materials, and enduring the pain of failure to obtain the final product was seen as an insult to art.

Allen’s blue ribbon opened Pandora’s box. Now, we can no longer ignore the questions pouring out of it. Is AI a tool for creation, a collaborator, or a ghost copying our souls? To answer this, we must examine past records, analyze current phenomena, and explore future possibilities.

Chapter 1: The All-Consuming Storm

The ripple caused by “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” was only the beginning. The AI storm is expanding its power across all creative fields, cracking what was once believed to be uniquely human territory.

#Music: The Ghost’s Voice, The Soul’s Copyright

In 2023, the song “Heart on My Sleeve” shook the music world. Perfectly replicating the voices of global pop stars Drake and The Weeknd, it quickly amassed tens of millions of views on TikTok and YouTube. Created by an anonymous producer named “ghostwriter977,” the song was so realistic that even fans were ecstatic. But this was just the start. Recently, AI trained on the voice of legendary rapper Tupac released new songs, and AI composition service “AIVA” has been creating music across genres from classical to rock, earning credits as a film music director. This goes beyond mere style imitation, sparking a realistic fear that an artist’s identity and the uniqueness of their soul can be replicated.

#Literature: Writers Putting Down Their Pens

One of the core issues in the massive 2023 strike by Hollywood writers and actors was AI. Resistance arose against studios using AI to draft scripts or unauthorized use of actors’ digital likenesses. In Korea’s webtoon industry, a famous artist faced fierce criticism after admitting to using AI for background work. In Japan, AI-written novels even passed the first round of a literary contest. AI now learns story structures, mimics human emotional arcs, and penetrates the deepest realms of creativity.

#Architecture and Design: Architects of Imagination

In architecture, AI already proposes designs beyond human imagination. Architect Hassan Ragab gave AI an imaginary prompt: “Ancient Egyptian architecture built in the style of Antoni Gaudí,” and AI produced a fantastic result blending curves and natural forms. This goes beyond designing individual buildings to designing massive systems optimizing city-wide traffic flow, sunlight exposure, and energy efficiency.

Controversies now shake the entire creative ecosystem, beyond specific genres. We stand at a major turning point requiring a fundamental rethink of industrial structures, copyright, and the very definition of creativity.

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Chapter 2: History Speaks, Anxiety Repeats

Today’s anxiety toward new technology is not unfamiliar. History has witnessed similar scenes many times. Technology always seemed to threaten human roles but ultimately elevated human creativity to new levels.

#Camera: Liberating the Painter’s Brush

When photography first appeared in 1839, the painter community was gripped by fear. Portrait painters, who devoted their lives to precise depiction, lost their place. Human effort seemed powerless against “machine-drawn pictures.” But this crisis evolved art to a new dimension. Impressionists like Monet handed over the task of “exact reproduction” to photography and instead began capturing inner landscapes that photos couldn’t—shimmering light, fleeting impressions, subjective emotions. Paradoxically, photography freed painting from the shackles of reproduction and turned the artist’s “eye” inward rather than outward.

#Synthesizer: Expanding the Orchestra’s Soul

In the 1960s, when Robert Moog invented the synthesizer, the music world reacted coldly. The idea of one machine mimicking an orchestra requiring many musicians was rejected. Critics called it “soulless machine noise.” This prejudice was broken by Wendy Carlos’s album “Switched-On Bach.” Performing Bach’s intricate classical music solely on synthesizers, the album swept the Grammys and earned acclaim. It proved how cold electronic machines could richly and freshly interpret classical music imbued with human soul. Since then, synthesizers have permeated rock, pop, jazz, and expanded modern music’s expressive possibilities explosively.

The histories of photography and synthesizers reveal an important pattern: new technology does not destroy existing art but expands its definition and pushes human creators to focus on what is essential. AI will be no different.

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Chapter 3: Dancing with Ghosts in the Machine

While many fear AI, some artists have gladly taken the ghost’s hand and begun a new dance. They see AI not as a rival but as a partner inspiring creativity, opening new horizons of collaboration.

#Using Data as Paint: Refik Anadol

Media artist Refik Anadol makes AI his most important collaborator. Feeding AI millions of natural images, city data, even brainwave data, he creates “data sculptures” visualizing poetic patterns hidden in data. In his works, data is not cold numbers but a living organism dancing. Here, AI is more than an image generator; it becomes a new sensory organ revealing unseen worlds to humans.

#An AI with My Voice: Holly Herndon

Musician Holly Herndon created an AI named “Spawn” trained on her voice and conversational style. She treats Spawn not as a mere voice modulator but as an equal “ensemble member” co-creating ideas and songs. She believes Spawn’s unpredictable sounds subtly carry her life. This shows AI can go beyond imitation to become a partner expanding the creator’s identity and creating new personas.

Their work shows that art in the AI era is shifting from polished “results” to the original “process” and “concept” of creation. Art now evolves into a question of not what (What) is created, but how (How) and why (Why) it is created.

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Chapter 4: The Path Forward, Ideas for a New Renaissance

So what should we do in the face of this great wave of change? As history shows, AI may signal not the end but the beginning of a new Renaissance for human creativity. Here are some concrete ideas for the way forward.

Idea 1: The Question Architect

If AI is the ultimate “Answer Machine,” humans must become the ultimate “Question Machine.” Future creation will start not from sophisticated technology but from original questions. Asking boundary-breaking questions like, “What if Van Gogh painted deep-sea landscapes?” or “What if Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was reinterpreted with whale songs?” will be a core skill. Creators will become conductors of the AI orchestra and captains of exploration vessels.

Idea 2: Process as Art

In an era where ownership of results is ambiguous, the creative “process” itself can become a unique art form. Jason Allen’s 600 conversations with AI—the prompt records—are as important as “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” New art forms will emerge that document and exhibit the intense dialogue of refining questions, failing, and redirecting to get desired AI results.

Idea 3: Translator of Hyper-Personal Experiences

AI can learn from billions of data points but cannot learn your dream from last night, your first love’s memory, or your grandmother’s old stories. This is the last bastion of human creativity. Expressing one’s deeply personal experiences and emotions through AI as a translator into new forms of art never seen before is key. Imagine visual art from heart rate data after a marathon or music composed from a diary of heartbreak.

Idea 4: The AI Critic & Ethical Creator

As everyone uses AI to create, art that critically explores AI technology itself and exposes underlying biases and social issues will become vital. Visualizing racial biases hidden in AI training data or performing the spread of AI-generated fake news as performance art—“AI critical art” will be one of the most important voices of our time.

Idea 5: Amplifying Creativity: Human+Human+AI

The greatest future creations will not come from a lone genius or a single AI but from ‘Centaur’ teams of diverse humans and AI collaborating. Philosophers pose questions, data scientists implement AI models, poets interpret results to create new narratives—this fusion will become common. It will break down creativity’s boundaries and open an era of collective intelligence beyond individual imagination.

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Epilogue: The Soul Dwells in the Question

The story returns to Jason Allen. All his work began with a strange question: “What if women in Baroque dresses wore space helmets to watch opera?”

Machines cannot ask such whimsical and beautiful questions on their own. Curiosity born from understanding the world, life experiences, and imperfect emotions—that is the most human creativity left to us in the AI era and the direction we must pursue. The brush is now in AI’s hand, but the soul deciding where to point it and what to paint remains ours. And that soul dwells not in answers but in great questions.