Generative AI and Creativity

Generative AI — tools that create text, images, music, and code — has arrived in every creative field simultaneously. This raises fascinating questions about creativity, authorship, and originality.

What generative AI can do

Modern generative AI can produce: essays and stories that read as human-written; images indistinguishable from photographs or professional digital art; music in virtually any genre; video from text descriptions; and working computer code. In each case, the output is novel — not copied from specific sources — but built from patterns learned by training on human-created work.

Is AI creative?

This depends heavily on what you mean by creativity. If creativity requires consciousness, intention, and emotional experience, then AI is not creative. If creativity is the ability to produce novel and valuable outputs, then the question becomes more contested. Most people land somewhere in between: AI is a powerful generative tool, but human creativity involves something it currently lacks.

The training data question

Generative AI was trained on human creative work — often without the creators consent or compensation. Ongoing legal cases will determine whether this constitutes copyright infringement. The issue is not settled in New Zealand, Australia, or most jurisdictions.

What this means for you

AI tools are available now and genuinely useful for creative work. The most interesting creative practice is probably not avoiding AI or outsourcing everything to it — it is developing a thoughtful, intentional approach to where you use it and where you bring your own distinctive voice.

The students who will thrive creatively in an AI world are those who develop a clear sense of what makes their own perspective, voice, and vision distinctive — and use AI as a tool that serves that, rather than replaces it.