Understanding the source of genuine creativity in an age of AI-generated content.
As AI systems produce text, images, and code at scale, the question of originality becomes urgent. Does creativity require something uniquely human—experience, suffering, joy, the friction of a lived life—or can machines participate in it? The answer shapes how we use these tools and what we value in our own work.
True originality, we argue, isn't the absence of influence. It's the integrative act: taking what exists, running it through a particular human perspective, and producing something that couldn't have emerged from anyone else. AI can expand the palette of inputs and possibilities. It cannot supply the perspective. That remains irreducibly human.
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