Late at night, when the house is still and my hands are stained with whatever pigment the day left behind — paint, milk, dust, pixels — I find myself scrolling through AI-generated art. Not out of necessity. Out of a hunger I can’t quite name. Some of it moves me. Some of it chills me. And some of it feels like looking into a mirror someone else polished.

I remember when creativity meant mess. Fingers dipped in clay. Sketchbooks heavy with bad drawings and half-finished ideas. That silence in the studio before the work starts to speak. But now, creativity has shape-shifted. The brush is a neural net. The muse is an algorithm. And we are no longer alone in the act of making.

What Do We Mean When We Say “Creative”?

Let’s start here. Creativity — real, skin-in-the-game creativity — has always been about risk. The risk of failing. The risk of being misunderstood. The risk of showing too much. It’s never been clean.

So when people ask, Can AI be creative? I feel the question misses something essential. The better question might be: What happens to human creativity in the presence of AI? How do we metabolize this new collaborator who doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t carry childhood trauma into their brushstrokes?

When I use tools like Midjourney, Runway, or GPT itself, I don’t feel like I’m outsourcing my creativity. I feel like I’m extending it. Stretching it through a new medium. Like moving from charcoal to oil. From analog synth to modular code. The friction shifts — but the ache to say something true remains.

Collaboration or Co-optation?

There’s a haunting beauty to the idea of machine collaboration. I’ve seen AI finish a sentence I didn’t know I was trying to write. I’ve watched it imagine creatures I could only half-dream. Sometimes it makes me feel like a god. Other times like a ghost.

But let’s not romanticize too much. There’s a real tension here. Who owns the output? Who holds the authorship? When a model has been trained on millions of human works — stolen, scraped, unlabeled — is its “creativity” just a shimmering collage of other people’s sweat?

Rosi Braidotti wrote about the posthuman as not the end of the human, but the end of a certain kind of humanism. One that centers autonomy, mastery, singularity. In this light, maybe AI isn’t erasing our creativity. Maybe it’s eroding the ego in it. Making it more porous. More networked. Less about “I made this” and more about “this emerged.”

Still — that erosion hurts. Especially for those of us who’ve bled into our art. Who’ve spent decades honing a style, only to watch a prompt generate something eerily close in seconds.

Creativity as Becoming

I think of Donna Haraway’s idea of staying with the trouble. Not rushing to solve or escape the complexity, but living inside it. AI and creativity live in that troubled space. It’s a place of grief and excitement. Of mourning the old ways while feeling lit up by what’s possible.

Maybe AI is making creativity more iterative, more collaborative, more speculative. It’s also making it more dependent on infrastructure — data, servers, access. The myth of the lone genius dissolves under the weight of GPU rendering times and bias mitigation protocols.

But even in this new terrain, the body remembers. The heart knows when something is real. Whether it came through code or canvas. Whether the spark was ours alone or shared.

Final Thought: The Work Is Still the Work

Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I ask GPT to write with me. Not for me — with me. It’s like dancing with a shadow. Sometimes it steps on my toes. Sometimes it teaches me a new rhythm. But it never replaces the part of me that wants — deeply, achingly — to make something that matters.

We are not becoming less creative. We are becoming differently creative. Messier. Multiplicitous. Post-singular. And still, always, looking for beauty.

As Ursula Le Guin wrote, “The creative adult is the child who has survived.” Maybe AI is the next sibling in that survival. Not a rival. Not a replacement. Just another hand in the paint.

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