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Given the rapid growth of generative AI and society’s addiction to manipulative, corporately controlled online platforms, you might think this is the end of skilled creativity. If anyone can make a film or a song or a novel in seconds, what’s left for skilled artists and craftspeople?

Well, quite a lot, I think.

Yes, we need to fight tooth and nail against the wholesale theft of our work by tech corporations, the loss of livelihoods, and the flooding of culture with soulless, vacuous simulacrums of creativity. Let alone the ecological damage and data harvesting. But I keep thinking about how MP3s and file sharing were going to kill live music, which has, in fact, flourished. At the time, it felt that, after the initial excitement waned, the ubiquity of downloads ended up increasing the value of in-person experience.

One of the most persuasive kinds of mendacity occurs when a misleading statement is, at face value, true. There’s a reason why it’s not just ‘the truth’ we ask for, but also ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.

An article I saw a while back (but have now lost*) argued that a key indicator for creative success is the ability to say ‘no’ in order to refuse distractions and focus on work. The particular trigger for this was that a researcher had approached a bunch of creative people to find out what made them tick and had been struck by how many of them either didn’t get back to him or refused on the basis that they were too busy being creative. The implication is that by refusing to get involved with other stuff you maximise your creative time and keep your focus, ergo saying ‘no’ is good for creativity. Well, kinda. You have to have a lot else going on besides saying ‘no’; you need decent ideas, high standards, tenacity and the rest.

Maybe AI can save us (by accident)

Creativity and the Real Power of Saying ‘No’

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