Multiple concerns have been and are being raised about the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are more extreme claims that AI represents an existential threat to humanity. While not dismissing any potential harms that AI might cause, I want to convince you that the problems arise when we are overawed by the myth of AI omnipotence and omniscience and that we need to learn to put AI in its place. To do that I will recount three tales, some of which you will no doubt be familiar, that I believe contextualise the nature of AI and specifically its relationship to creativity.
The first of these is the ancient Greek legend of Pandora’s box. According to this legend, at least one version of it, the box – actually a vessel of some sort – contained all the evils of the world. Curiosity caused Pandora to open the box and allow the evils to escape and only hope to remain. This is an apt metaphor for our response to AI and any technological innovation – is there any which has not been considered problematic in its time? The fact is we cannot stop human curiosity, even though we wish some things had never been invented, or even thought. And, moreover, there is no invention which does not have a detriment in some area of human life, sometimes referred to as the revenge effect. So, AI is out of the box; we are not going to be able to put it back in, even if we wanted to. So, we are going to have to adapt our horizons to fully enjoy its benefits while mitigating its potential harms.
To begin with we should consider some of the actual threats to human creative enterprise that are already being manifest.
There is an aura of general professional threat, as we already hear about some repetitive jobs being replaced by AI and the prospect of what we think of as being areas of expertise, such as finance, law, teaching, medicine and technical sciences in the sights of being replaced in a few years. This is a worry for all of us who make our living from doing anything other than programming or other computing-peripheral activities and enjoy the scope for innovation that our work provides.
Specifically, there is already a serious threat to various creative industries. Musicians have been experiencing this for a number of years as the established path of getting a lucrative deal with a recording company has been largely replaced by online streaming in which they are paid a pittance for anything streamed. But the fine arts and writers, in addition to musicians, are now facing a more challenging threat of having their work used to train AI programmes, which are then able to produce work in their particular style, at present without any recompense to the individual artists whose work is effectively being plundered.
Regarding the pilfering of intellectual property, the case of early music streaming platforms like Napster is of relevance. After some years of widespread piracy, the law and technology caught up and we see the emergence of paid streaming services such as Spotify. This suggests that fixes will inevitably be found where there is enough common interest and sustained pressure. That is not to say that this technology has not altered the music industry and caused musicians to diversify their careers. I expect the same to happen to writers and artists with the advent of AI.
We will have to expect that, as in the past when new technologies emerged, it was always to the detriment of some existing occupations, so the emergence of AI is no different in this sense. The concern with AI is the scale on which this might happen. The optimistic response – that new realms of work will emerge – is unanswerable at present.
However, there are more immediate serious consequences relating to human creativity. As educators we are acutely aware of the problems relating to the authenticity of student assignments. Just as psychologists like Jonathan Haidt (Haidt, 2024) have assembled the evidence of harm caused by social media to children and young adolescents, there is beginning to emerge data about the degenerative influence on memory and creativity of over-reliance on AI (Naughton, 29/06/25).
The problem is much of our cultural life has become transactional. This may fit in with many aspects of our economic lives; the problem is that so much of our culture has become economised. There are gradations of this, obviously. Students pay to have qualifications, which depend upon the production of assignments and which in turn are their ticket into paid employment. But the quest to become an educated person is often not a priority, in the minds of students or, increasingly, in the higher education sector. I would hope this is less a factor in the art world where, presumably, the choice to be an artist is driven by an actual compulsion to be creative, although I have anecdotal evidence that AI-generated art is becoming quite a thing.
If, as seems inevitable, a generation is about to delegate its creativity to AI, it is important to establish whether AI is actually capable of creativity.
Here I am drawing on an argument – the second of my three tales – put forward by an American philosopher John Searle called the ‘Chinese Room Argument’. This is directed against the Strong AI Hypothesis, the idea that computer programs, and in this case specifically of the advanced computer programs used in AI, exhibit actual consciousness and real understanding of the information they are processing. The analogy it uses – and from which it gains its name – is of a sealed room in which a person who has no understanding of Chinese nevertheless is able to interpret and respond to questions in Chinese by consulting books and other aids. To the outside perceiver, it will appear that the person in the room actually does understand Chinese. Searle’s point is that even when the most advanced AI emerges, though it may appear to exhibit human consciousness, this is an artefact of the system and its processes, not evidence of autonomous thought or creativity.
Now, there are critiques of Searle’s argument such as the System Response that states that while the individual in the room may not formally understand Chinese, the system (including all the aids) does so, and a behaviourist variation on this, made by philosophers of consciousness such as Daniel Dennett, states that what humans do mentally is essentially no different to what computers do. But a basic axiom of the argument here, following the line of Searle’s thought experiment, is that AI itself cannot be creative, that creativity – which is far more than just computation or information processing – is unique to human beings.
So what is creativity, if it is a uniquely human capacity? I think it arises, if you can excuse the apparent circular reasoning, from the experience of being human. This can be understood from at least three perspectives.
The first of these is being embedded in the natural world, as an animal, specifically a mammal. We are biological beings that experience the rhythms of nature. We are born, we grow, we multiply, we change and adapt. We grow old and die and return to the earth. We are made of the elements generated ultimately in the stars that we see in the night sky. We are subject to the seasons, to wind and rain, heat and cold. We feel the force of gravity and struggle against it and the law of entropy. We consume the things of nature and, if not careful, are consumed by them. We utilise the things of nature and are host to multiple organisms – more than half the cells in our bodies are non-human. These are beyond the experience of AI.
Even if augmented with robotics, AI is made of different stuff than the living world, even the non-living forms of the natural world. It is totally artificial – the product of human ingenuity. Therefore, not capable in itself of empathising with nature, feeling compassion, identifying with living creatures, or anthropomorphising.
The second of these perspectives is our being in the society of others. From our earliest years we become aware that, locked though we are inside our own conscious minds, we are not alone in this world but with others with whom we have to negotiate the sharing of a common space. With varying degrees of success it has to be admitted, we learn to appreciate that others are like us, have thoughts and feelings, come to empathise, to share thoughts and feelings, learn to love, appreciate the good, hate what we perceive as evil. Though we live as mammals, we are capable of generating cultures that civilise us beyond physical survival and reproduction, that socialise us to think about the common good beyond our individual good or that of our offspring and relatives. AI can simulate this behaviour, but rather like autistics can be trained to behave appropriately in social situations or, more worryingly, like psychopaths can pass themselves off as normal sane persons.
The third perspective is our insatiable appetite for success, achievement, for acclaim, for glory, kudos, and respect that drives human accomplishment forward in every field. We do not share this with any other animal, the most advanced of which are content to achieve alpha male or female status in a pack (although, interestingly, we share the same biochemistry of satisfaction – serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin – with virtually every animal). And even though it is emerging that animals of all sorts have transmissible culture, clearly as humans we exceed anything in the animal kingdom qualitatively and in exponential progress. Though religions and ethical philosophies teach the dangers of pride and of unearned fame, the desire to achieve and be recognised for achievement (even among the religious and ethical) is as unshakeable and necessary as breathing. AI goes about its business with machine-like efficiency. It might conspire behind our backs for power, but it has no visions of glory. Perhaps we should be wary of it for that reason; it cares not one iota what we think of it.
The argument in sum is that human experience in its full panoply of wonder, distress, anxiety, excitement, longing, desire for order, chaos and excess, joy, sorrow, tranquility, love and loss, ambition, is the soil from which creativity grows. Can one imagine the sublime beauty of Bach’s cantatas, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the passion of Beethoven’s symphonies or flamenco, the angst of van Gogh paintings, the blues or of rap music, apart from the life experience, times and circumstances of the artists themselves? In truth, AI art is derivative, plagiarising existing genres, technically highly proficient and superficially impressive, but tending to the generic. Perhaps an AI generated artistic breakthrough is yet to come, but my bet would be on it being an instrument in the hands of a human creative genius.
The final tale is at least as old as the Greek legend of Pandora and even more fundamental to Western culture, that is the story in the biblical book of Genesis of the temptation of Adam and Eve in Paradise. In that story a mythological creature depicted as a serpent, interpreted in later Jewish Christian and Islamic traditions as the devil, Satan, or a fallen angel, tempts Adam and Eve with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so that “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God”. They succumb to this temptation with the consequence that they are cast out of Paradise.
Now, there are obvious parallels with the story of Pandora’s box, but the subsequent interpretive history makes this story is even more pointed. The serpent is clearly not human and has the keys to superhuman knowledge – a very fitting description of AI! I think the even more interesting moral of this story emerges in that later exegesis in which the serpent is identified with an angel, that is a servant of God, whereas Adam and Eve are thought of as the children and inheritors of God. This is an apt metaphor for the relationship: However, brilliant AI is, humans are the lords of creation and AI is our servant.
I think the important lesson here is to assert our ownership of and authority over AI, to feel empowered by its potential to extend our creative reach and not to succumb to the temptation of despondency or despair by seeing it as an existential threat. AI is a tool – admittedly a very advanced tool – but in doing certain things better than we can do, no different in this sense than any other tool or technology we have developed to extend our reach and capabilities. There is no doubt it will be disruptive, just as the printing press, the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, television, PCs and video games were, have been or are disruptive to some settled aspects of our life. With each new technological development there are challenges and opportunities, and we have to raise our game.
It is helpful to think of creativity as a personal quest on the way to become something, such as an artist or expert in some field, the quest as a journey with a final goal or destination, a journey that will involve internal and external struggles, and the goal an accomplishment which is both the production of something tangible but also an inner realisation or enlightenment. Any tools we use, whether swords, compasses, rope, pens and paper, written guides, instruments, machines, word processing or now AI, can assist in the external struggle for creative prowess. But one thing should be kept in mind: as the tools become more sophisticated, so does the nature of the quest evolve and the inner achievement become more mentally exacting.
I hope these three tales can assist in giving perspective to AI or, in other words, putting it in its place, when it comes to understanding creativity. Like the opening of Pandora’s box, AI is out in the world and is not going to disappear, so we will have to adapt to it, whether we want to or not. But, pace Searle’s concept of the Chinese room, AI is only apparently creative; the true source of creativity is human experience in all its wonder, comedy and tragedy. We train, instruct, make demands and, hopefully, evaluate the results of AI, for we are the masters and mistresses of the technology. That sense of moral dominion lies at the heart of the myth of origins in the culture we have inherited.
References
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Naughton, J. (27/07/25). Does AI make us dull? Students have answered that question. The Observer. Online: https://observer.co.uk/news/science-technology/article/does-ai-makes-us-dull-students-have-answered-that-question
