AI Is a Gift to Human Creativity
When anyone can produce passable work, real talent becomes more readily apparent than ever.
By Brian J. Gross
Chad CroweAs Oscar contenders like “The Brutalist” deploy artificial intelligence to perfect foreign accents and AI-generated country tracks top the charts, anxiety is roiling the creative community.
Fear mongers warn that AI will hollow out artistic expression, de-skill entire professions, and damage our capacity for original thought.
It won’t.
AI is ultimately a boon for creativity.
True, AI can finish work by itself without an artist, but that affects the volume of output more than the nature of human creativity.
AI relieves humans not of creativity but of drudgery—the rote, time-consuming tasks that have always consumed more human energy than inspiration ever did.
Artists have never defined themselves by their use of certain tools, but by what they do with them.
The Industrial Revolution provoked a comparable dread.
As Phil Gramm and Michael Solon recently wrote in these pages, the transition from artisanal production to industrial scale was denounced as “disastrous” and “terrible” even as it increased life expectancy by 25% and lifted standards of living.
While some jobs vanished, far more and better jobs appeared.
The same thing happened when assembly lines reshaped manufacturing, when robotics entered the factory floor, when computers displaced typewriters, and when the internet placed a printing press on every desk.
The surprise isn’t the anxiety; it’s how reliably we forget its cyclical nature.
What critics of AI overlook is the enduring lesson that when tools change, human creativity doesn’t shrink.
It expands.
The fear that AI-assisted art is somehow “less human” rests on a false binary—modernity vs. meaning, algorithms vs. imagination.
Artists have always been open to using the most advanced tools, because the greatness of the work has never depended on the rustic purity of their instruments.
Orson Welles didn’t shun technology in “Citizen Kane”; he pioneered deep-focus cinematography, added ceilings to sets for unprecedented angles, manipulated lighting for psychological texture, and cut time with “lightning mixes” that astonished audiences.
His innovation was inseparable from the technical frontier of 1941.
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” remains one of cinema’s most audacious visions because Kubrick embraced technology.
He built a rotating centrifuge to simulate gravity, engineered elaborate model work, and collaborated on the now-legendary slit-scan technique that produced the “Stargate” sequence.
Kubrick wasn’t defending fragile human purity against machines.
He was using machines to extend human imagination.
With access to today’s CGI, Kubrick could have achieved the same artistic vision more efficiently and precisely.
Does that make “2001” less of a masterpiece?
Would Welles’s breakthroughs mean less if computer-assisted lenses had existed?
The premise collapses on inspection.
The anxiety, then, isn’t that AI will replace genius.
It’s that AI will produce cheap, abundant mediocrity.
That, too, is nothing new.
Mass production didn’t eliminate craftsmanship; it elevated it.
When Henry Ford introduced assembly-line manufacturing, he delivered reliability at scale—but he also made the hand-built automobile a luxury good.
Anyone who has driven both a Lexus and an Aston Martin knows the difference between machine precision and the human touch.
One is flawless; the other is distinctive.
Both have their place.
AI will create a similar divide.
The proliferation of AI-generated content won’t diminish great art; it will sharpen the distinction between abundance and brilliance.
When anyone can draft a passable paragraph or storyboard an idea, exceptional talent becomes more apparent than ever.
What changes isn’t the nature of creativity but how creators spend their time.
And like earlier creative revolutions, AI lowers the barriers to entry.
Just as personal computers democratized publishing, these new tools allow emerging creators to develop ideas once reserved for studios and capital-rich gatekeepers.
The circle of participants in art will be widened as millions who lack formal training begin to sketch, compose, design and explore.
Some worry that audiences will no longer be able to distinguish the human from the artificial—a real anxiety, but a transitional one.
As with every past shift in media, new norms for authenticity will emerge.
The deeper truth is that AI is less a rival to human creativity than a multiplier of it—allowing people to spend more time on what technology can’t replicate: judgment, taste, voice, imagination.
A language model can imitate Hemingway’s rhythm but not his soul; it can echo Shakespeare’s cadences but not the consciousness that produced them.
That AI can, for a moment, fool our ears is a testament to its power as mimicry.
That it can’t touch us in the depths of our hearts is why it makes human originality more, not less, precious.
Human creativity isn’t an output function.
It lies in choices—what to emphasize, what to omit, what risks to take—the forms of judgment no machine can automate.
The challenge for policymakers, then, is to resist the temptation to smother AI with fear.
Regulation should focus on establishing clear rules for attribution, data use and ownership so that the rarest element in the creative economy—original human insight—continues to be rewarded.
The Industrial Revolution, the information age, and the early digital economy all show what happens when we let innovation raise the baseline: more opportunity, more discovery, more unexpected flashes of genius.
A decade from now, we will likely see today not as the end of human creativity, but as the moment when originality became more valuable.
Creativity is not a fragile candle threatened by a gust of wind. It is the force that builds the wind tunnel.
Mr. Gross, a lawyer, has worked on Capitol Hill and for the Federal Reserve.
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