Creativity, according to Arriagada, is the ability to come up with ideas or make things that are original, unexpected, and meaningful. From this perspective, something is considered creative if people experience it that way, even if it wasn’t made with intention or awareness.
One of the prompts we asked chatGPT was to write a poem as if it were Edgar Allen Poe.
This was the response:
Beneath the moon’s unblinking eye,
Where whispers coil and spirits sigh,
I trod the halls of shadowed thought
And mourned the peace I never caught.
A tapping—soft—upon my mind,
As though some grief I’d left behind
Returned to claim its wretched due
In midnight’s cold, unyielding hue.
No dawn shall break this sable air,
No solace find me waiting there—
For in that gloom I came to see
The darkest haunt… resides in me.
What makes this poem interesting and creative is how it uses a dark, spooky mood similar to Edgar Allan Poe, with images like shadows, whispers, and midnight that create a mysterious feeling. It also stands out because it is not just about something scary happening but shows that the real fear comes from inside the speaker, which gives the poem a deeper meaning. This connects to the idea in The Artifact isn’t the art: Rethinking creativity in the age of AI by Ashish Bhatia that creativity is not just about the final product but about the effect it has on the audience. Even if something like this poem could be imitated by AI, it still counts as creative because it produces emotion, atmosphere, and meaning for the reader.
I was also surprised that AI can create a poem in a similar style to Edgar Allan Poe because I expected that kind of emotional and atmospheric writing to be something only humans could do well. The way it was able to copy the dark tone, imagery, and rhythm made me realize how advanced AI has become at mimicking creative styles. It challenged my idea that creativity always has to come from human experience, since the poem still feels meaningful even though it was generated by AI.
These experiments shifted my thinking about creativity because they showed me that creativity is not only a human skill, but something that can also be produced by AI. I used to think creative work had to come from personal experience and emotion, but seeing AI generate a poem in a style similar to Edgar Allan Poe made me realize that similar results can be created without those human experiences. It also made me question what really makes something creative, since the AI poem still felt meaningful and well crafted even though it was not written by a person.
In conclusion, the AI did demonstrate what I consider to be creative because it was able to produce a poem with strong mood, imagery, and emotional impact. Even though it was not written by a human, it still created a meaningful experience for the reader and successfully captured a style similar to Edgar Allan Poe. This made me rethink my understanding of creativity and recognize that creative outcomes can come from both humans and AI if they are new, engaging, and affect the audience in a powerful way.