Is human creativity a myth?

Video: AI, philosophy, & creativity as a fake concept

Happy June! Spring got a late start in New York, but the weather’s finally getting nicer. It’s a great time to check out the perfect solstice movie. (That one’s a year-round watch for me, personally.)

This post is based on a seminar I held in March 2025. It’s called “Creativity is Dead, Long Live Creativity!: Generative AI and the Artistic Mind," and it was one of my first forays into public philosophy. The event page with the full description is here.

Since it went really well back then, I figured I’d turn it into something I could share online. A link to a downloadable audio file is right underneath the video; here’s the same video on YouTube, and here’s a PDF transcript. I put the timestamps below - they summarize each section, complete with links and citations.

In case it’s not obvious, this was mostly unscripted. Since I tend to err on the side of over-explaining rather than under-explaining (side effect of teaching undergrads for so many years), my ad-libbing got pretty wordy. At the event, there was a lot of audience interaction, which made it quick and dynamic. Hopefully the video captions help the pacing, but you might prefer it at 1.5x speed.

The Lenox Institute’s inaugural event will be even more interactive. It’s called “Do Words Still Mean Things? Language and Communication in the Age of AI,” and it’s Wednesday June 10th, 7-9pm, at Index Space Chinatown. Tickets are selling out! There will be alcohol! (And N/A drinks too.) If you’re in New York, I hope to see you there.

Timestamps

0:00-59: Introduction

1:00-2:49: Opening thought experiment: “Does it count as self-expression?”

2:49-8:23: Thought experiment discussion, emphasizing theoretical differences between the ontology of art and craft.

8:24-14:29: On patterns, form, and the possibility that physical media have creative agency.

14:30-19:00: On constraint-based creative techniques, with reference to the history of aleatoric music and the OuLiPo movement. (It’s not a coincidence that “aleatoric” was coined the same year as “artificial intelligence!”).

19:01:-26:14: Discussion of Joanna Zylinska’s 2019 book AI Art: Machine Vision and Warped Dreams. AI Art draws extensively from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, so there’s some commentary on Whitehead, too.

26:15-28:49 Revisiting the issues of patterning, rule-following, and predetermination as they shape how we think about creativity vs. “mere” pattern-following. This includes an overview of AI history, with some discussion of the Eliza chatbot. I also explain how machine learning is different from older forms of AI.

28:50-34:21: On the analogy between machine learning and human learning (it’s useful, but only to a degree.) There’s also some consideration of reasoning models, drawing on my research on whether reasoning models’ chain-of-thought outputs are a faithful representation of their internal process (I published an article about this in Communications of the ACM last year.) And: causality, whether human creativity can be explained mechanistically, and the role of linear time in AI vs. natural mental processes. (When I say that AI deals with information “instantaneously,” I’m thinking about parallelization.)

34:22-36:20: Review of the two major points of the seminar. One of them supports the possibility that there’s no such thing as “human” or “organic” creativity; the other’s more on the human side. I don’t say which one I prefer - I try to stay as neutral as possible when I teach - but at the event, I heard a lot of opinions from the audience.

36:21-40:25: Closing discussion questions, which review concepts introduced throughout the whole thing.

40:26-close: Conclusion

Two more things: first, Instagram deleted Lenox’s account - apparently they really don’t like VPNs, and now we’re scrambling to get our followers back. I guess it’s better that this happened while we’re still getting started, but it’s a headache. The new account is here; it’d be a big help if you followed us. (My account is pretty thin too, but that’s no problem. I don’t know if I want a personal relationship with IG…).

Last but not least, signal boosting: the Acid Horizon Research Commons and LEPHT HAND both have a lot of fantastic programming coming up. If you like what I’m doing here, you should give them a look.

That’s all for now! As always, thanks for tuning in.