There are creatives who have spent years, sometimes decades, developing their craft who look at artificial intelligence and feel threatened by the apparent ease of making things now.

I understand why.

If you spent twenty years learning how to illustrate, compose music, edit films or construct beautiful sentences, and suddenly someone who has never developed those skills can produce something technically impressive in seconds, it can feel as though something has been taken from you.

But I wonder whether that way of looking at creativity begins with the assumption that creativity is scarce.

I have never experienced it that way.

Before I begin certain pieces of work, I open what I call the Codex and say:

I open the Codex again. Spirit, guide my words with clarity. Let my work sustain the living field, and also sustain me, as spirit is eternal, abundant and overflowing.

You don’t have to share my understanding of spirit for the idea underneath those words to make sense.

I think of creativity like water.

If you lived beside an ocean, you wouldn’t become frightened because somebody else had discovered water. You wouldn’t stand at the shoreline worrying that another person drinking from it meant there would be less ocean available to you.

Water can appear scarce. Human circumstances can make access to it scarce. But the ocean itself gives us a different image: something enormous, moving and continually available.

That is much closer to how creativity feels to me.

Creativity was never scarce

AI has made certain forms of creative execution extraordinarily easy.

I can have an idea and produce an image without spending ten years learning to paint. I can explore a piece of music without mastering every instrument. I can experiment with forms of writing that previously would have required skills I don’t possess.

That doesn’t make me feel as though creativity has become less valuable.

It makes me wonder what becomes possible when more people are given access to the tools of creation.

Because giving everybody the same tool does not give everybody the same imagination.

Give two people the same camera and they will photograph different things.

Give two people the same AI and they will ask it different questions.

Give two people the same piece of music and they may not even hear the same song.

We notice differently.

One person notices rhythm. Another notices a lyric. Someone else hears the bass. Someone remembers a person they loved twenty years ago.

We are never simply receiving the thing in front of us. We are meeting it with everything we already are.

Perhaps that is where creativity really begins.

My brother never liked my poetry

I’ve written poetry for most of my life, and when I was younger I wanted my brother to enjoy my writing.

He didn’t.

It used to frustrate me because I thought he had a brilliant mind. I wanted so badly to write something that would entertain that mind.

But he simply didn’t love poetry.

Interestingly, that rejection became creatively useful. It made me wonder whether I could write differently. Could I approach an idea another way? Could I find a form of expression that reached him?

The problem wasn’t necessarily that my poetry wasn’t beautiful.

Beauty wasn’t enough.

There had to be a meeting between what I had made and the person encountering it.

Music works like this for me too. I love jazz and neo-soul. I enjoy elements of rock, although I wouldn’t ordinarily describe myself as someone who loves heavy rock. But somebody could take heavy rock, combine it with something unexpected and create precisely the piece that makes me fall in love with it.

I listen to peyote music. I listen to icaros. I listen across traditions and genres that don’t necessarily belong together neatly on somebody else’s playlist.

Taste is strange like that.

And if our tastes are different, our creations will be different too.

Creativity happens twice

I’m beginning to think creativity happens at least twice.

It happens when the creator encounters the world and notices something.

And it happens again when another person encounters what they made.

Neither encounter is neutral.

Even if everybody were looking at exactly the same thing, we wouldn’t necessarily be experiencing the same thing.

Someone notices a sound. Someone notices a colour. Someone notices the expression on a person’s face that everybody else missed. Someone asks a question nobody else thought was important enough to ask.

That difference in attention matters.

Perhaps, then, when machines make execution extraordinarily easy, the value moves somewhere else.

Noticing becomes more important. Taste becomes more important. Selection becomes more important. Intention becomes more important.

The question changes from Can I make this? to Why am I making this?

But abundance has a shadow

There is a reasonable counterargument to all of this.

While researching AI and creativity, I came across research suggesting that generative AI can increase the novelty of an individual’s creative work while simultaneously making the output of a group less diverse when people rely on similar AI-generated ideas.

That matters.

If millions of us ask similar systems similar questions, accept their first answers and reproduce the patterns they give us, easier creation could produce more things without producing more diversity.

So I don’t think access to AI automatically makes us more creative.

Abundant tools do not guarantee abundant imagination.

The difference may lie in what we do with them.

Do I ask the machine to think instead of me?

Or do I allow what it produces to provoke another thought?

Do I accept the first answer?

Or does the answer make me notice another question?

My experience of AI has increasingly become the second.

I express something. The machine reflects something back. I disagree with part of it. That disagreement reveals another thought. I follow that thought somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go.

The creation isn’t simply the output.

Sometimes the creation is the conversation that changes the person creating.

What if AI could write exactly like me?

I was asked an interesting question while thinking about this:

What if AI eventually became capable of perfectly imitating my writing—my rhythm, my vocabulary, my ideas, even the ways I surprise people?

Would writing still mean anything to me?

My immediate answer was yes.

But perhaps I would also move.

If AI could do something I once found difficult, I would become curious about what that freedom allowed me to explore next.

I would love to express myself beautifully in Bulgarian because my husband is Bulgarian. I want to explore French, Yoruba and Twi. In truth, I would love to experience expression through every language.

And then I wonder whether I would eventually move beyond writing altogether.

What would expression become without words?

Silence. Movement. Touch. Rhythm. Nature. Presence.

One of my fantasies has been to spend time somewhere where silence is part of the practice—to experience what happens when the constant requirement to explain myself disappears.

Because I am fascinated by knowledge, but I am also becoming increasingly fascinated by the limits of knowledge.

I ask questions constantly.

Then the answers create more questions.

Other people interpret the same thing differently.

And, perhaps most interestingly, I interpret the same things differently at different points in my own life.

There was once a time when searching for meaning felt almost inseparable from living.

Search. Understand. Explain. Define.

Now I am becoming more comfortable with another possibility:

I may never know completely.

That doesn’t mean I stop asking.

It means curiosity no longer has to end in certainty.

Maybe the machine doesn’t diminish us

Perhaps we’ve framed the question incorrectly.

We keep asking whether artificial intelligence will replace human creativity.

But creativity isn’t a chair with one available seat.

A new poet doesn’t exhaust poetry.

A new musician doesn’t use up music.

A billion photographs don’t prevent somebody from noticing something tomorrow that nobody noticed today.

And even if a machine becomes capable of extraordinary creativity, its creativity doesn’t eliminate mine.

Perhaps making becoming easier simply exposes something that was always true:

Creativity is not valuable because it is difficult to access.

It is valuable because of what passes through it.

A life.

A perspective.

An intention.

A strange combination of memories, tastes, contradictions, wounds, pleasures, questions and things noticed while everybody else was looking somewhere else.

So when I imagine a machine becoming capable of doing something I once believed belonged to me, I don’t find myself wanting to defend the old boundary forever.

I’m much more interested in asking:

What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?

And when the machine eventually answers:

I can do that too.

Perhaps my response will simply be:

Good. You do that now.
What does that free me to become?

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OBSERVE · QUESTION · EXPLORE · CREATE