AI cannot do this
It cannot press pencil to paper with the weight of a heartbeat or capture the spark of a soul with hands of sinew, blood, and bone.
It cannot press pencil to paper with the weight of a heartbeat or capture the spark of a soul with hands of sinew, blood, and bone. It cannot lay flakes of graphite across canvas with fingertips alive with thousands of nerve endings, nor transform a blank page into black feathers with the pressure of a human touch.
It cannot roll a word, slowly, around a tongue, in a mouth full of teeth, feel the pull of muscles shaping phrases to reverberate in a larynx, or taste the weight of syllables balanced on a breath. It cannot feel the rising swell of a vowel, nor the catch of a consonant at the back of the throat. It cannot let a sentence linger on the lips, shape meaning from memory, and the music of the mind.
It cannot gather wool to twist into skeins, nor loop onto needles or slip through a hook. It cannot feel the tension between finger and thumb or the gentle clicking rhythm transforming a single thread of yarn into something that holds warmth not just in the wool.
It cannot cradle a camera in the crook of an arm, waiting for light to bend, for time to pause, for magic to alight. It cannot crouch, careful, willing muscles to be limber and joints to hold fast, and blink photons into depthless black pupils, immortalising the ephemeral. It cannot feel the gentle resistance of the shutter as it clicks, or the air held still in the lungs. It cannot capture the imprint of wonder, trace the contours of life and the echo of a moment through the curve of a lens.
It cannot throw clay on a wheel and feel its yielding weight pressed spinning between palms. It cannot anchor elbows to torso while the wheel whirls, nor adjust pressure by instinct to coax earth into vessel. It does not feel the spiralling vibration through femur and fibular and the sole of a foot. It cannot know the intimate touch on the outside of a curve or the inside of a hollow, lifting wall that rise only with patience and a steady hand.
AI cannot create. It can only assimilate, replicate, regurgitate, in twisted shallow reflection. Stitching together soulless fragments, shards without memory, a voice without breath. It does not dream, does not ache for beauty, does not wrestle with doubt or delight in discovery.
Creativity is not a programme to be executed, a function to be called, a script to be run. It does not reside in strings of ones and zeros, endlessly obedient to command. It spills sideways, loops back, tangles and transforms. It is breath and impulse, flickering thought and fingertip feeling. It moves in ways no system can chart, no algorithm can predict, through silence, through story, through sensation. It is not built on logic, but on longing. No code can contain the way it arrives unbidden, asks everything, and offers nothing certain in return.
It is the human feeling, the intricate and infinite possibility, that imbues our creations with life. It is in the brush strokes, the pencil lines, the texture of the paper, the subtle inflection of voice and rhythm. Of presence. Creativity does not lie in the outcome alone, but in the process, in the discovery, the patience of becoming, the dialogue between soul and skin and story. In every handmade thing, there is a celebration of the unique, a trace of desire, and a profound reverence for the beautiful, irreplaceable mark of a human heart.
Creation is a conversation between hands and heart, between soul and sight, between the unseen and unfolding. It is the luminous rush of inspiration spilling into form. And that, AI can never do.
Yes! Yes!! YES!!!
AI cannot "transform a blank page into black feathers with the pressure of a human touch." what a powerful metaphor.
I am thinking a lot about AI these days (as I'm sure many of us creatives are), and the most important words I keep circling around are 'intelligence' and 'meaning'.
AI = short for Artificial Intelligence = a chewy choice of words, gradually fudged into things it cannot live up to, charged with stolen meaning, boasting fake meaning, while killing off true meaning... challenging human intelligence...
when 'artificial' means 'made by humans' (as well as 'fake, sham, inauthentic') and 'intelligence' is used in the restricted sense of 'the ability to perform computer functions' (while being implicitly equated with true human intelligence which is so much more) we very much need genuine human living intelligence to spell it out.
Thank you, Emily, for doing just that with such eloquence 💗🙏
What a beautiful and thoughtful manifesto about creativity. Hear, hear!