For me, creativity isn’t just producing something new—it’s producing something that feels meaningful or intentional. Based on our readings, I’d connect this to the idea that creativity involves both novelty and value. Something can be original, but if it doesn’t resonate or feel purposeful, it doesn’t fully count. At the same time, I’m not convinced creativity requires consciousness or lived experience, even though some philosophers argue that intention
So, did the AI demonstrate creativity here? I’d say partially, but not in the same way humans do. The passage is clearly novel in the sense that it wasn’t copied from anywhere, and it has emotional value—it creates a vivid feeling. But I don’t think the AI “understood” what it was doing. It was recombining patterns it learned from human writing. In class, we talked about functionalist arguments—if something produces outputs indistinguishable from creative work, maybe that’s enough to call it creative. This example kind of supports that idea, because if I didn’t know an AI wrote it, I might assume a human did.
At the same time, there were limits. As the story continued, it slipped into predictable territory—loneliness, overload, eventual isolation. It felt like it ran out of originality once it moved past the opening mood. That made me think the AI is strongest at style and imitation, but weaker at sustaining deeper, intentional development.
This experiment definitely shifted how I think about creativity and AI. Before, I saw AI writing as mostly generic and mechanical. Now I think it can produce moments of real beauty or insight—but those moments are inconsistent and not driven by genuine understanding. It made me realize that creativity, at least for humans, is not just about producing something that sounds good, but about having a perspective behind it.
Margaret Boden, “Creativity and Artificial Intelligence” (1998)
It’s really interesting to see that AI does not really know what to do and what it is doing in the case of creative writing, but by providing actual examples that we want the AI to mimic it actually get better but in the sense of “better at imitating this specific poem”, so I guess it is kind of creativity but not as what we do?
I really like your definition of creativity. I see that you believe Ai didn’t fully show creativity but I would’ve liked to see the example and prompt you had used in your example. I also do like how after you experimenting with creative Ai, it has shifted your view on it.