On Creativity and AI

Implications, Lamentations, and Invitations

I suspect that we’re rapidly approaching a future where the creative act will persist, neither as a primary form of commodity, nor as a futile attempt at resistance, but as the respiration of our very humanity.

The AI revolution sits poised to flood the marketplaces with artifice- with recycled traces of cognition. It may well render any commercial need for creative labors functionally null.

And while much is to be mourned in such a rapidly emerging landscape, there is hope. Namely, an offer of return to true freedom of expression. Such is the nature of creation that is born of no necessity, save for the soul’s propensity to stretch out its form into reality’s expanse.

The masses may well be numbed and entertained by AI slop. Corporate production may well be satiated by algorithmic mediocrity. And the damned creatives may well be left with nothing to do but to create, if only for their salvation’s sake.

Such salvation cannot be rendered through approbation, or the metrics of consumption, or reception, but only via the intrinsic satisfaction of expression itself.

Sans external motivation or reward, the conscious birthing of form from the formless (while apprised to its essential impermanence, insubstantiality, and even relative irrelevance) acts in natural alignment with the very forces of nature, whose breadth and vest both yield and sustain this whole of this perfect mess- AI included.

Salvation has always been wrapped up in alignment or “oneness” with the Dao, which is rarely of note from the outside in. Indeed, when it is, it tends to reek of artifice and performance itself.

AI’s capacity is to rob us of our modes of production, and the valuation of our labor, but also of commodified resolve, of our capacity to stand out amidst the proliferation of output, and therefore of our motivations to seek immortality in those places where it cannot be found (i.e. the passing fancy of the minds of others). The sagely way requires no audience after all, and tends to be encumbered with the presence a stage.

I fully suspect that the longterm implications of AI will be generally destructive, not only of natural resources, and to the development of human capacities, but also to livelihood, and both physiological and psychological wellbeing. In other words, samsaric, duhhkhic, and kleshic in effect. But alas, it is only from such processes and states that liberation can be realized, and no doubt the fields will be fertile.

Truly, dharma gates are limitless. There’s no time like the present to cultivate awakening.

~JRP