On Creativity: Randomness through a numbers game

Famously known creatives such as Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Elvis, or Jobs have impacted billions of people for many years after releasing their creative pursuits. Some were ahead of their times, others were an immediate hit. Some had to succumb to massive amounts of resistance, others were born into certain lives where they had more opportunities. The only thing that they all have in common is that they have nothing in common at all. All led different lives, worked during different hours of the day, and had contrasting historical contexts.

The unpredictability of their creative genius means that reaching the zenith of mass human creativity will probably never happen, even with AI. ChatGPT has been annoyingly trending, leaving people with massive amounts of new information they do not know yet what to make of. The word is that due to AI we are at the pinnacle of creative explosiveness. Now I’m not here to talk about ChatGPT, but rather why it will never bring about mass creativity or replace the truly creative.

The truly creative will always be an anomaly in their time. That is because on the second of making a decision or an idea, the truly creative do not rely on direct inputs or some sort of pattern. For them, preconceived experiences, shared ideas, and learnings are only a groundbed for a decision. Statistically, there could be an infinite amount of outcomes. And if one relys solely on AI he will lack external data which has not yet occurred to influence an outcome.

I am not disputing the fact that the AI revolution and new software tools will allow more humans to express and produce new ideas. And I do not yet know the extent to which AI can propel the judgment of the already creative. What I do know is that the more inquisitive or engaged an AI or a person is, the better the ground is set with pre collected data. Add the both together, meaning a highly creative person inputs their groundbed of data points to AI, the AI will extrapolate even more random or creative results.

Digging a little deeper on why the truly creative will always be a rarity, even with AI. If we’re talking about a human, someone whose mind is engaged with the world 24/7 their chance of being creative is much higher than someone who resists engagements (to me, engagement means using all of one's senses and feelings in the present moment to connect to reality + previous senses and feelings about data, this could be further explored in another writing). As for AI, the more data it can collect from various previous databases, the higher chance it can produce more accurate correlations.

The very nature of determined unpredictability (with an underlying rich groundbed) is what will differentiate the creatives from the “AI creatives”. Thus, making the truly creative irreplaceable by AI. Consistently being able to solve complex problems or come up with paradigm shifting ideas is one in a million. Execution, on the other hand, also matters… but this is also for another blog.