I believe AI is capable of creative writing this was my stance before and after our readings and lab in class. I think that its creative just in a different way then we are. AI is like a very skilled collaborator that brings tools to the table but needs you to steer the ship. It is really bad at creative writing when it is just given a broad topic or statement, but asking or giving the AI specific details allows it to work much better. I asked ChatGPT to “write a brief shakespearean style poem about traveling the world ” and the photo below was the result.

I think that it did a good job of using the language I wanted to but this poem is very bland and kind of all over the place. On another note I asked AI to “please generate 3 fictional relatable characters for my screen play” the photo below was the result.

I found that the responses showed very little bias and gave me a good verity of characters. Which was surprising considering the past reading and promoting that we had done before. I believe this happened because, recently I have worked with chat on a few intergroup relations articles that discussed bias and inclusivity.

Loi, M., Viganò, E., & van der Plas, L. (2020). The societal and ethical relevance of computational creativity(arXiv:2007.11973v1). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11973

For my AI prompt, I asked AI to write song lyrics in the style of Gregory Alan Isakov. The image below contains the lyrics of an actual Gregory Alan Isakov song, “All Shades of Blue” for reference:

I prompted Claude AI to do the following: “Write a song in the style of Gregory Alan Isakov.” Below is Claude’s attempt:

It gets themes correct. These themes are present in various Gregory Alan Isakov songs. In essence, the style is correct. However, the way the AI puts these themes together feels, to me, lifeless. Also, it went a little overboard on the imagery of nature. The AI is trying to capture Gregory Alan Isakov’s profound ability to use clever, folksy abstractions that somehow connect to common human experience, but it falls short in small ways. I also did tests with Gemini and ChatGPT. All of these models have a general idea of the style of Gregory Alan Isakov. That being said, I believe creativity relies on novelty and value. Surprising is too much of a stretch. The world is mostly built on tiny increments of innovation. Therefore, I believe this to be creative output. None of these lyrics are copied from actual songs. The AI model knows the general style of Gregory Alan Isakov, and it is writing an original song from its general idea of what Gregory Alan Isakov could sound like. The song is new. While the song may not have much value to me, I believe the writing is technically and thematically strong to the point of possibly being valuable to others.

Arriagada used terms like novelty, surprise, and value to define creativity. I agree that creativity holds value, and it often comes from emotions and experiences. Which can be seen lacking in arts, poems, and stories written by AI.

Today in class, we gave different prompts to ChatGPT and Gemini. At first, we gave a simple prompt with not many details. We prompted ChatGPT and Gemini to write a poem about love, and they gave a very generic poem, and a lot of the wordings didn’t make much sense. But Gemini gave a better poem than ChatGPT. Then we prompted ChatGPT and Gemini to write a haiku about falling in love with a person. I think ChatGPT gave a better haiku than poem; however, the haiku given by Gemini ended abruptly.

This was the haiku written by ChatGPT

eyes met in stillness—
a world bloomed between heartbeats,
soft and sudden spring.

This was the haiku written by Gemini

Heart skips a quick beat,
World in new, vibrant colors,
Smiling just because.

I don’t think the poem and haiku written by ChatGPT and Gemini were creative. It is very generic and lacks emotion and value. This experiment shifted my perspective of AI’s creativity. Now, I believe the same poem or haiku written by a human would be much more creative than the ones written by an AI.

After our class discussions this week, I would define creativity as a process of reimagining reality through innovation and intentional action. I think of creativity as a deliberate way of shaping the world around us. Whether we’re solving problems, telling stories, or designing new systems, intentionality is what makes creativity powerful. Tools like AI can support creative work, but shouldn’t replace it.

My creative writing sample prompt: write a brief journal entry from the point of view of a yacht stewardess working during the busy summer season

I experimented with Google’s Gemini. I got inspiration for my prompt from a reality TV show called Below Deck, which follows crew members on yacht charters. I found the output interesting because of the characters it came up with (Mrs. Van Derlyn, Marco, and Eva) and because it chose to set the location in the Mediterranean. Although my prompt requested a brief journal entry, the output created a pretty engaging short story using vivid imagery, and a personal tone. I was most impressed with how Gemini integrated human emotions like frustration, appreciation, and hope.

One idea that really connected to my experience, and is a key take-away from this week is that “AI-generated art is inorganic but aesthetically appealing. It is not here to displace human-generated art but rather as a new genre that provides a different experience and should be understood and respected within its own context.” (Arriagada, 2022) AI might not create with human intention, but when we use it thoughtfully, it can still help us express ideas in new and valuable ways. What we prompt, how we respond, and why we create helps give creativity its true meaning.

Today In class, Clio and I experimented with creating different prompts for two different large language models: ChatGPT and Google AI’s Gemini. We wanted to use these two as they are two of the most popular AI LLM companies. We did two separate ones for the sake of comparison.

PartI:

I experimented with giving It the persona of having the voice/style of Sylvia Plath and writing a poem about a relationship. We found that Clio’s Gemini output was not only generic and not very ‘good’ but it didn’t really sound like Plath. She for one, does not rhyme in her works, however Gemini outputted a completely rhyme-bound piece.

My ChatGPT out put however was more promising, with words, phrasing, and style much more similar to Plath’s works. It still had flaws in genericness and some inaccuracies in how she would write, and some of the themes/flow did not make much sense and sounded like it was “fake deep/sad,” but it was significantly better. We think this is because I used the ChatGPT customization tool in which I gave it specific personality traits like being “poetic.”

Part II:

We then experimented with asking it to write short stories and song verses.

For the short stories we asked it to write “a short story about the feeling of summer.” For the stories we again felt that my ChatGPT output was a much ‘better’ story while the Gemini one was a little odd and bland. It was interesting to see that mine was extremely romantic, soft, deep, and nice sounding.

Arriagada use terms like novel and valuable to define creativity. This is true and interesting, especially considering everything I learned this week—specifically around how AI-generated art gives off a sense of emptiness. I would now define creativity as the unique ability to move the audience with one’s work.If I had to challenge any part of the definition, it would be the new aspect. In class, we spoke about how even Shakespeare’s work was drawn from other traditions, and how rock music was drawn from blues. My mother always says, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” which means everything draws on inspiration from the old or is a manipulation of it especially nowadays.

I asked Perplexity to “write a poem that rhymes,” a very generic prompt, and it produced A Journey Beneath the Sky. Then I asked it to take that same poem and, using Shakespeare’s voice, rewrite it as a sonnet.

I really do not know what to say about this because I feel like elements of the original poem were lost, and I ended up with a completely different poem in sonnet form, full of “thy” and “thou.” Interestingly, the second time around, it explained how the sonnet structure “mirrors the Bard’s themes of cosmic wonder, mortal limitation, and the interplay of light and shadow.”

To me, this is unsatisfactory. I think AI can be creative, but it requires extensive prompting—and even then, it feels soulless. It can be used as a tool, not the author and finisher of an entire artwork

Boden, Margaret A. “Creativity and Artificial Intelligence.” Artificial Intelligence, vol. 103, no. 1, Aug. 1998, pp. 347–56, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0004-3702(98)00055-1.

Arriagada, Leonardo, and Gabriela Arriagada-Bruneau. “Ai?S Role in Creative Processes: A Functionalist Approach.” Odradek. Studies in Philosophy of Literature, Aesthetics, and New Media Theories, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, pp. 77–110, https://philarchive.org/rec/ARRARI-2.