Does AI kill creativity?

I’ll just cut to the chase:

Absolutely not.

Creativity will not only survive, but human-created art will be purified. Let me explain. 

The problem with this whole “AI art sucks!” debate is that people are too focused on art as a capitalist product rather than what it really is: a spiritual creative practice of the highest order. 

If you see art merely as a capitalist product, then yes, AI will kill a lot of art. Companies will have absolutely no qualms using AI art to save on labour costs. They’re not gonna go out of their way to hire kari lilt from Sydney to design their wombat logo when they could use Stable Diffusion v3.5 for free (the latter of which would complain a lot less about design revisions, although the former is cooler and has better hair). 

AI will absolutely revolutionise commercial design. Like it or not, it’s a train that can’t be stopped. We are already seeing the beginnings of it now, and it will only accelerate alongside rapid AI progression. 

So where do human artists exist in this digital new world?

Let’s first talk about what art really is. 

Art isn’t some zero-sum game where if a better artist came along, we’d all just stop creating.

Art is a life-affirming practice of what I call “the unbearable urge of getting the shit in your head out on paper” (or canvas, or screen, or whatever medium you use). Notice how AI has zero impact on this urge. 

Humans are very good synthesis machines - they gather elements from their environment, combine them in cool and weird ways, to create novel things. These novel things expand the breadth of human understanding through figurative play. If these human synthesising machines are good enough at this, they are called an artist. 

Now you, as a lovely human artist, can still create new and beautiful art. You can still experience the transcendental joy of getting lost in a good painting. You can still write poetry and prose and pretty pieces. These are all beautiful human experiences that will never be lost in the post-AI haze.

Perhaps human commercial design will die, but human art will survive. In fact, it might become even more valuable as a marker of authenticity in a world overrun by deepfakes and meaningless AI outputs.

DOES AI KILL CREATIVITY?

Like I mentioned before, this kind of thinking is zero-sum and scarcity-based. Human creativity is abundant and will always be. But let’s first explore what creativity means.

Creativity = Psychosis + Intelligence

That is, creativity is just the reification of your hallucinations in a coherent and concrete form. 

It is therefore your job as an artist to convince people that your hallucination exists. 

Art is the alchemy of converting a lie into a truth.

Now, there are many different ways to achieve this alchemy. A painter shows her vision of a gorgeous sunset with her unique impasto renditions. A sculptor shows their interpretation of pain through the anguish of marble expressions. A photographer shows their views on nature through hazy forest shots. A writer shows his vision of love with a poignant story of star-crossed lovers. 

Similarly, you could use AI as a tool to show the world your own hallucinations. In this sense, the user becomes more of a director, but still a creator nonetheless.*

So to answer the question directly: no, AI will not kill creativity. Humans will use AI to channel their creativity, but the quality of the output is not at all guaranteed.

*I will concede: I do have a lot of criticisms of AI art, even if I am open-minded about it. The soullessness of this output (what detractors call “AI slop”) is another debate altogether. I also see a trend of AI art being mass produced as dopamine porn for fervent doomscrollers. This can be explored in another blog post...

BUT WHAT ABOUT ARTISTS BEING REPLACED BY AI?

Of course, there is a valid concern here - the economic concern. As AI art grows, it threatens the income of artists who rely on commissions to make a living. For many, art isn’t just a passion, it’s also a livelihood.

But here’s the bigger picture: we’re possibly moving toward a post-scarcity world where automation and AI will revolutionise our entire economic system. When machines handle more of our production and services, traditional income streams will look different. The marginal cost of creating and distributing digital content is already collapsing. This could mean fewer people relying on art commissions as a primary income source, allowing artists to create more freely, without their creativity being limited by market demand. This might be an insane world for you to imagine, but just a decade from now it might be surprising to anyone that we ever thought differently. Would be cool to check back on this in 10 years.

Art was never meant to simply be a capitalist commodity. The AI revolution might be a great thing for art in the modern world. By divorcing the market value from art, we return art to its purest form - as an act of spiritual creation.