Creativity is Dead, Long Live Creativity!: Generative AI and the Artistic Mind
The concept of creativity has a surprisingly short history. While ancient philosophers expounded on imagination and free will, theorizations of creativity as a distinct trait only date to the past hundred years. The word itself, meanwhile, was not in common use until the mid-twentieth century: with the end of World War II came widespread reflection on the meaning and value of human life, and creativity was cast as quintessentially human and deserving of serious study for the first time.
The postwar period also saw the rise of computer programs designed to replicate the powers of the mind, aka “artificial intelligence.” Against this backdrop, today’s advances in generative AI (genAI) seem to represent the end of a decades-old research agenda.
GenAI suggests that creativity is not unique to humans or even conscious organisms, but is reducible to mere calculation and programming. Has creativity finally been revealed as a sham?
In this Olio, we will approach this question from multiple angles. We’ll start with thought experiments that embody the philosophical issues raised by genAI tools.
From there, we’ll consider how scholars and artists have framed the relationship between creativity and technology, with a focus on perspectives that highlight art-making as a process of working with rather than through technological and social intermediaries.
The figure of the creative genius whose ingenuity is theirs and theirs alone looms large in Western thought, and it may be that this emphasis on individualism has primed us to impute creativity to machines. Close attention to artistic creation as a material and contextual process divests humans and computers of special status, pointing up creativity as something more akin to a transpersonal — maybe even metaphysical — force.
Perhaps this framing gives humans the short shrift; perhaps it fails to embrace our new AI overlords. In either case, we must ask: was creativity always a myth, and if so, is this a problem?
Our professor for the evening:
Emma Stamm has been writing and teaching on technology, philosophy, art, and politics for over a decade. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Social Thought from Virginia Tech, where she combined research in critical theory and continental philosophy with the empirical study of AI and psychology.
She has held full-time professorships in the Department of Philosophy at Villanova University and the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at SUNY Farmingdale and adjunct professorships at NYU and Virginia Tech.
In her free time, she writes fiction and music for piano. Her website is o-culus.com and her social media home is https://assemblag.es/@emma.
Join us at Little Honey for a classic Olio with professor Emma Stamm, on a topic we've all been waiting discuss with an expert other than ChatGPT 😅
We'll have beer, wine, N/A beverages and delicious pizza available for purchase and you're welcome to arrive a bit early to settle in and have a meal before the class / stay after to hang with the group.
*Event art is: "Barrier Canyon Style” rock paintings, probably the oldest of the rock art traditions found in the Utah region (with origins perhaps dating to around 5,000 BCE).