The world is fixated on creativity. One cannot go for a day without encountering social media forums lauding an artist for her creativity and movie reviews attacking new spin-offs for their lack thereof. Many people assume that creativity is a uniquely human attribute, some going as far as saying that creativity is at the core of our humanity. Creativity manifests itself in various ways: an abstract idea in an essay, an intuitive solution to a thought puzzle, even a unique way to construct a table. Yet, on further thought, it’s not immediately obvious what these have in common aside from their human origin. To rectify this problem, many philosophers have put out criteria for creative events and actions. However, the continuous and momentous advancement of AI tools renders many of these established boundaries questionable, if not obsolete. This makes it harder to distinguish a line at which excessive AI use in an otherwise creative work corrupts the process by which it is derived. This essay evaluates the previously accepted ideas and assumptions underlying the attribution of creativity, reconsidering these points of contention within the context of modern AI development, and proposes a new way by which the level of creativity within a process or result might be measured empirically.
Humanistic Creativity
Philosophers have traditionally disagreed on what the term “creativity” actually means. For example, Socrates defined creativity as more of an instinct, a moment of inspiration that overtakes wisdom to influence human creation. This definition is not wrong, per se, but it reflects the common assumption that creativity is a process unique to humans, thereby creating a sort of circular definition which is inherently hard to defend or reject. In other words, these definitions assume that creativity is a descriptor of human attributes rather than a standalone trait.
This bias has been apparent throughout history, with British philosopher Francis Bacon
These concepts, however, are not invulnerable to ambiguities: it is extremely difficult to evaluate whether or not something is valuable, since such matters are based on one's personal values. Likewise, a “new” idea can be new to the author but not the world, prompting further discussion on the scope to which creativity applies. A prime example of this can be seen in the independent discoveries of mathematical and scientific theorems, as in the case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who both came up with the concept of evolution at roughly the same time. The current definition of creativity, therefore, would have a difficult time attributing creativity to either of these people.
Creativity as a Concrete, Binary Attribute
The modern definitions of creativity are steered off-course by the development of science and society. Will Durant writes in A Story of Philosophy that philosophy thrives in the space beyond science and within the inexplicable, being pushed and pulled by what modern science can and cannot explain. In recent times, new technologies have continued to advance and prosper, challenging many assumptions underlying the traditional perception of a creative process or product. This paper proposes the case of reconsidering the definition of creativity in the age of technology.
One of the biggest issues with the current definition of creativity is that it judges ideas, inventions, and media as either creative or uncreative. However, this overlooks processes or products that are composed of ambiguous components. For example, the use of many human-operated yet not human-controlled tools in modern art (e.g. fire, explosives, machinery) has come under intense scrutiny. Some may argue that the non-traditional methods used in the creation of abstract art remove its creative merit, while others may say that the intent and the message of a piece are what makes it creative. It then seems unreasonable to judge many abstract art pieces as either creative or uncreative, considering the combination of arguably creative and uncreative steps to their creation. The judgement of these criteria is further limited by the insinuation that creativity must be an attribute of a person, product, or process, overlooking potential overlaps within these (e.g. a person and his creation).
Finally, the current definition fails to handle respective ambiguities within the contrived uniqueness of a creation and how practical it is. Creating a string of obfuscated, random text may be new, but lacks a sense of useful value, making it seem intuitively uncreative. On the other hand, the act of refining a pre-existing creation would not be creative, since the product created already exists, even though the refined creation has a higher sense of pragmatic value. Therefore, it seems awkward to use this definition to classify unique, artistic expressions which may or may not have a practical use.
Product and Process in Creativity
One core issue within the discussions of creativity is the role of product versus process in determining whether a behavior or artifact is creative. If gauged separately, they may fall victim to edge cases whereby a creative process engenders an intuitively uncreative result. Therefore, a better solution is to gauge the creative merit of a creation based on both product and process, instead of each aspect independently. We can visualize this combination using a two-dimensional graph, thus uniting the contribution of process and product on the overall creativity as a whole. The vertical axis represents the level of creative process the author expresses, and the horizontal axis represents the level of product individuality, uniting the evaluation of product and process in evaluations of a creative flow.
As an example, a person may develop and write an essay through their own writing process, producing a final draft that presents a perspective that is both novel and insightful. Considering the two-dimensional analysis, this process would score highly on both scales, being a creative process and product (Figure 1). However, what if that person undertook the same, individual, process to produce a piece of writing that perhaps may not be as insightful? Their product may not be as creative, but the process used to produce the product perhaps was, leaving room for consideration that their project had at least a creative process and suggesting that the activity itself might still be somewhat creative while still acknowledging the deficiencies in the creative attributes of the product.
Applying this spectrum to one of the earlier examples shows its merit in terms of fully judging creativity. Current definitions of creativity award the attribute in ambiguous ways, as in the case of the aforementioned simultaneous discovery of evolution by Darwin and Wallace; under the original definition of creativity posited in the start of this essay, there is a strong case to be made that both of these people acted with creativity (in considering the process) and an equally valid case that neither one did so (if taken into account the product). Neither of these cases sound quite right; as it seems as though the creative process Wallace went through resulted in an uncreative product. However, merging the two results in the conclusion that both of these people acted with (as least) a moderate degree of creativity, assuming that the discovery was truly independent.
AI Complications
The rise of generative AI is yet another complication to the product / process separation defined above. Although many agree that AI is capable of creating sophisticated and meaningful works and imitating certain artistic practices traditionally considered humanlike, others have doubted whether a deterministic generative model like modern Large Language Models (LLMs) may ever be creative. Yet, it is inarguable that many works produced by AI is bordering the point at which it is indistinguishable to those produced by humans, as evidenced by both the third-party Turing Test study conducted by Jones et al. (2025) and the mass hysteria surrounding the realism of OpenAI’s Sora 2.
In other words, many crucial definitions concerning creativity, including the “traditional definition” discussed throughout the first sections of this essay, assumes that creativity may only be expressed by entities with agency, disqualifying the attribution of creativity to non-agents, regardless of how intuitively creative their works may seem. Taking the logical assumption that humans do hold agency (barring some extreme viewpoints on human existence), and noting that AI models typically require human input to produce art most often intuitively judged as creative, it is then fitting to say that AI models, while technically autonomous, should be considered a tool when it is involved with a process or result being judged for its creativity. The autonomy of these tools, in conjunction with the agency they lack, suggests that using an AI tool to a great degree within a process may decrease the creativity involved in a creative product.
Other viewpoints uphold the “Chinese room” doctrine as a major objection to the idea that AI lacks agency. Whether or not an underlying process truly represents conscious and heuristic actions, they argue, does not matter as long the results of that process is intrinsically indistinguishable to that produced by humans, citing the Turing Test study conducted by Jones et al. (2025), in which AI models successfully fooled human users into wrongfully judging them as human in a rigorous test where a human judge communicated with the AI and another human simultaneously over text. This argument, however, overlooks the fact that the AI model was able to disguise itself so well because it was prompted to do so with a faux personality, undermining that the AI model may claim agency by introducing elements of human interference in its processes.
Societal Implications
With the case for creativity redefined, it is important to consider how these ideas are significant in society and our everyday lives. As AI continues to develop, our current notion of media will continue to deteriorate and erode, as more and more cases of AI usage crop up in the entertainment we interact with. Already, we see AI generated material en masse within social media platforms such as Youtube and Instagram, and we can only predict that it will continue to grow and develop, taking root in other forms of media such as television or books. This creates an unavoidable dichotomy between AI creators and human creators, with human creators unable to match the speed with which AI accounts can push out content. Interestingly, we have already seen a similar trend in the form of modern art, with some criticizing abstract artists by arguing that a concerted lack of effort within many modern art pieces decreases their value.
When one considers AI in the same vein, however, these criticisms are amplified. Considering media as a whole, we can separate the general trend of content quality created in terms of three main criteria: audience demand for quality, ease of creation, and accessibility of content. If we take a look at movies as an example, we can find that the high demand for “good” movies, the difficulty to access them compared to other forms, and the difficulty to produce a movie keeps the quality trend relatively high.
An opposite example can be seen in short-form content, where a 30-second video that is readily and easily accessible through the Internet leads to audiences caring much less about the general quality of said content. This leads to a general decline of quality across time, as more and more people continue to put less and less effort into generally poorer quality content in the name of making money or gaining popularity (as seen in trends such as brainrot). AI generated content nearly completely removes the effort put into creating any form of content, allowing creators to mass-produce videos. This effect is less prevalent in long form content, but with the rise of widespread, shortform media, the fact of the matter is that AI content will become (and already is) a large part of mass media, and it is certain that the AI influence will only become stronger and stronger, and it may only be a matter of time until we find full-length, blockbuster AI movies common in our theatres.
The deep impacts of this development cannot be understated, since distinctions between AI and human expression are among the major conflicts of our current society. AI is most likely to be the defining societal issue of our generation, and will undoubtedly become a prominent talking point for the years and decades following. As AI gets more advanced, and as it becomes more and more accessible to the general public, it will inevitably expand and incorporate itself into most, if not all aspects of media and creation. Fact-checking what we see will be a critical task for anybody interacting with creative products, and even today, we find that people can easily be fooled by AI generations that seem human.
Thinking deeply about how AI changes the idea of creativity will no doubt set the tone in how we encounter the dichotomy between human and AI interaction. After all, the process of an action and the product of said action is a human experience that is not just bound to artistic works. These dichotomies can be applied to even everyday tasks, and this may be the driving factor in retaining our human condition. Understanding why definitions must change as we move on represents the crucial ability to adapt, and further explorations will undoubtedly rise as AI advances.
Conclusion
This new definition is our own perspective on a relevant, modern version of the definition of creativity in today’s technological and societal landscape. Of course, this does not mean that this definition will always be correct: this essay merely attempts to highlight what is, at present, logical to conclude about the definition of creativity. As technologies grow, the environment in which creativity inhabits will change, meaning that our definitions must change alongside it. Future developments of AI might even upset our current understanding of cognition and agency; when the time comes, we will have to adapt, just as we always have. In general, creativity has remained an ambiguous and constantly evolving concept. The ways we create constantly change—by constantly refining and redefining creativity in the creative landscape we live in, we will be able to effectively judge and evaluate the merit of creations, no matter how, why, or who it was created.
Written by Matthew Li