It Takes More Creativity to Live in a World With AI, Not Less
Everyone will have AI, few will have taste.
Before we dive into this week’s essay, I want to say thank you to everyone who supported The Kimberly Column last week! I had no idea so many of you would be willing to contribute $5/month to fund my coffee shop writing habit. Your support means more than you know—and now I have even more reason to order that extra latte and keep the essays coming!
The novelty of artificial intelligence is continuous, it seems. Each day, thought-leadership warns AI is stealing creativity, artists outsource their work to systems, and questions about the future of creative careers flood headlines. Can humanity maintain itself in a world ruled by outputs and bottom-line thinking? What will the future hold when work is completely replaced and humans bask in the pleasure of artificial intelligence—if this truly is the end goal. These concerns are understandable, but they might be misdirected. Rather than rendering creativity obsolete, AI is actually revealing how essential and irreplaceable human creativity truly is.
Consider the rise of the TikTok “brainrot” fruit dramas. These short AI-generated videos feature anthropomorphized fruit (and lately, other inanimate objects) navigating absurdly dramatic scenarios—a banana facing ethical dilemmas at a construction job overseen by a threatening cherry boss, for instance. With the exception of the baby mamma storylines, most of these short-form videos share outcomes starkly similar to a severely watered-down version of Aesop’s Fables or Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” where humanoid fruit learn valuable life lessons, experience tragedy, or explain a deeper aspect of life. Yet, most viewers understand these videos are not art, at least not in any elevated sense. The point being: artificial intelligence didn’t create the phenomenon. A human did.
When this brainrot-art appears on my FYP, I have the same reaction when watching a particularly creepy, gory, or obscene moment in a film: “What sick, deranged person decided to come up with this?” AI may have played a significant role in making the idea sharable, but it didn’t write the prompt. It didn’t look at the fruit, lying still on the countertop, and wonder, “What if this banana confronted poverty and resisted greed?” AI is unable to initiate. It can only respond. A human must always prompt artificial intelligence to create.
Concerns surrounding the act of creation still persist. Cries to protect the sanctity of poetry, storytelling, and human experience through art continue to arise. I understand these concerns; I once held them when ChatGPT launched during the last half of my college career. (Back when you had to pay someone else to write your essays if you didn’t want to write them.) However, these thoughts were based in the unknown, not in experience.
Recently, my own experience with AI clarified its limitations. For months, I labored over two poems, working to capture a specific moment with precise imagery and originality to the initial moment of inspiration. After six months of rewriting, rewording, scrapping, scribbling and starting over, I turned them over to ChatGPT, searching for direction. I asked it to analyze the meter, evaluate whether the themes emerged, and assess whether the imagery was concise and effective.
Initially, it gave decent feedback. But as I made the prompts more specific - “generate ideas for this line,” “make the imagery more real,” “find a word to replace this one,” “how is the flow here?” etc. - the poems deteriorated. The poems grew dialectic, plain, and lifeless. Their imagery flattened, the tone dulled, and feeling evaporated. After hours of prompting and re-prompting, nothing resembling or imitating an actual human experience revealed itself. The machine could not feel what I felt, grasp the experience I deeply wanted to convey. It could not communicate a moment so true, real, and visceral to the human heart.
As a last resort, I reached out to a friend from high school who had given excellent feedback on previous work. She replied with fifteen minutes of voice messages, offering the exact line-by-line feedback required to memorialize those experiences.
She saved those poems, not because she is a genius (although she is) but because she understood the need for human-to–human connection. She did what artificial intelligence couldn’t do: She explained how those poems affected her when she read them, how the words created a picture for a moment she’d never personally experienced, and how the themes resonated to her soul. She also identified what required change: specific word suggestions, verse restructuring, and meter improvements. Most importantly, she connected the poem to the larger human experience, granting more impact and purpose to personal moments.
Listening to her thoughts, I grasped something fundamental: People relate to other people. The purpose of art is to use creativity as a mode to help us reach a better understanding of each other, of the human condition, and— ultimately—of our Creator. We create because He first created us; this is our essence and our Imago Dei. AI can process patterns and generate text, but it lacks the lived human experience required to create art that intentionally resonates with humanity.
It’s going to take more creativity to live in a world with AI, not less. Not because it’s stealing our essence, but because our essence is the entire purpose for participating in creativity. Artificial intelligence isn’t stealing creative essence; it’s revealing why this essence matters:
This doesn’t mean AI will leave creativity unchanged. It will certainly transform creative work, but only to elevate it, as much as every other great technological advancement throughout the course of history has done. The future belongs to people who can craft the prompts, who know what to ask for and why. And what develops this type of critical thinking? The humanities.
History, literature, linguistics, philosophy, debate, religious studies, ethics, music, art—the study of what makes us human. These practices and fields develop critical thinking, effective communication, and purposeful, empathetic perspectives. In the wake of AI, as artificial intelligence can execute technical tasks with increasing sophistication, the abilities that are distinctly human—to question, to contextualize, to connect disparate ideas, to understand what matters and why— will become the differentiating factors. These disciplines form the deep thinkers, the stellar communicators, the doers, the storytellers, and they are the future.
The humanities will not fall farther or diminish in light of the AI apocalypse; they will rise again.
The individuals who carry the highest potential to reform culture are those who cultivate taste: people who study the humanities because they genuinely want to, write for the sake of sharpening their own thinking, start conversations about polarizing ideas because they deem it necessary, ask questions out of authentic curiosity about the world, and endeavor to make their place in it. These people create and refine taste for themselves and others simply because it is a worthy and noble pursuit, not because an algorithm suggested it.
These are the people who hold the future, and they always have been. Not because they are creative, but because they choose to not remain limited to a prompt—instead daring to be the hand that writes it.
The future doesn’t belong to those who can use AI tools; everyone will be able to do that. It belongs to those who know what is worth making, communicate why it matters, and recognize the difference between proficiency and poignant. People who create regardless of artificial intelligence, endeavor to understand humanity, and make their place in it will shape the cultural heritage of our age.
I've been participating in AI prompt challenges on X. It's a fun way to feed the machine my own art and turn my characters into dancers or mech pilots or whatever. But what I'm starting to see is that real artists have a leg up on non-artists. I have actual art of my characters that I made. Most of these other people generated a generic anime character, dressed it up, and use it for prompt challenges. They all look the same. I can't tell the difference between Sad Goth Girl in Overly Complex Black Leather and Sad Goth Girl in More Black Leather.
The other thing is that I can think of better ideas on my own than these people running the challenges. And it's simple things. I had to suggest a western theme ... AFTER I had dressed my character in a cowboy hat and chaps for fun. I'm finding photos of landmarks and dropping my characters there on vacation. It's silly and fun, and somehow, nobody really thinks of doing that. The artists are who are going to use AI to its fullest potential. You know, as usual.
I agree with you!! There were so many amazing points in this article and I can’t wait to talk to you more about them but this one:
“It’s going to take more creativity to live in a world with AI, not less. Not because it’s stealing our essence, but because our essence is the entire purpose for participating in creativity. Artificial intelligence isn’t stealing creative essence; it’s revealing why this essence matters…”
God made us to create and it’s in the creating we experience Him as the Creator as He unveils the gifts and talents and glory He has put in us. Whether we are writers, artists, musicians, speakers, facilitators, we have the experience, the tried and tested scars that are shared in our art…even if it’s clandestine. AI can’t take us to the next level as it challenges us to be more creative.