Can AI Be Creative?

My latest video has surprised me. The views are down, which might be because it’s the summer vacation time, but the engagement is up. Viewers are watching quite a bit longer than the average video.

It is definitely more philosophical, but that is the direction that interests me at the moment and where I want to go.

The fossil field book developed by Chat GPT

Like may creative people, I’ve been in the doldrums thanks to the incredible ability of AI to create what, to most people, looks like amazing art.

But WE know better, don’t we?

But is it as simple as human good and AI bad? Can AI be a tool to develop human ideas?

Writing was seen as the end of civilisation when it superseded the oral tradition, but we seem to have survived the transition. Will we survive AI and come out the other side with a whole different idea of creativity?

Is AI just a tool or is it something else? In this video I develop an idea on paper and then move it on with AI. It does a great job that could easily be used as an illustration in a book or any where else.

Where was the creativity?

Was it me or was it ChatGPT?

Comments

2 responses to “Can AI Be Creative?”

Stoo Cambridge
August 2, 2026
I’ve had this discussion with a few people in my game dev circles, some use AI quite unashamedly for a lot of things. I personally find it brilliant for researching content and ideas, but draw the line, (puns are soooo last week), at using AI imagery for final production. I have used it for researching images a few times but always draw the final work myself. It saves me time having to do lots of image searching and trawling of endless websites for the information I seek.
It’s a tough one, there’s a lot of utter rubbish out there being generated, but as the language models become more refined, how long before the end results really, truly are indistinguishable from us old flesh and blood humans? Now?
Shoo Rayner
August 3, 2026
I find AI so interesting for philosophical conversations. Of course it all depends on how you set it up. At the beginning it was so sycophantic, but I’ve refined it to push back and have really interesting dialogues. But the thing that keeps coming out is that the ideas are mine. It puts them into a wider context or questions them and eventually I come up with something quite coherent. It’s about refining and editing ideas.
It’s quite good as a business sounding board, though it loses the plot sometimes and assumes you’ve taken it’s advice!
Yes, I’m sure its images will become flawless in time, but there will still be something missing that you can’t quite put your finger on.
For everyday ephemeral images on websites and magazines, its a no brainer, but for something more meaningful… well… that probably still needs a human who has done the work and training and is still thinking for themselves!

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