Can AI be creative?

In 1839, the painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype for the first time and reportedly said: from today, painting is dead.

He was wrong in the most interesting way possible.

What's the pattern?

Photography could capture a face more accurately than any painter. So painters stopped competing on accuracy. Within forty years they gave us Impressionism, then everything after it. Painting didn't die. It got pushed toward the thing a camera couldn't do, which was to show how it felt to look.

That's the pattern with every creative technology. The player piano. The synthesizer. Sampling. Each one was going to end music, and each one gave musicians a new instrument and pushed the humans toward what only humans could do.

Here's where I land on AI. I say on stage that it's a mirror. It reflects, amplifies, and optimizes. It cannot originate, discern, or care. That's not a limitation somebody will patch. It's what the thing is. It generates the most probable next thing, from everything that came before.

Novel, yes. Constantly. Original, no. Originality comes from a person with a body, a history, and a reason to say this particular thing. The machine has none of those. It has a very good memory of people who did.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things, if you run anything creative.

Use it for the accuracy problem. Drafts, variations, the hundred versions of a layout. That's the daguerreotype. Let it be fast.

Push your humans toward the Impressionism. What can they make that the mirror can't? Taste, a point of view, the choice of what not to say. Pay for that.

And credit like it matters. Say what's human-made. As I've written elsewhere, that label is about to become a market.

Delaroche was afraid of the wrong thing. So is everyone worried AI ends creativity. It ends the accuracy contest. The interesting part starts after.

What's the thing you make that a mirror couldn't?

Related: Is "AI-free" about to become a selling point?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote