Creativity is the Final Frontier

Creativity is the Final Frontier

January 2, 2025
3 min read

Talking heads and industry leaders once thought factory jobs and manual labor would be the first things to be automated and replaced by robots. They were wrong.

As LLMs have quickly evolved before our eyes these past couple years, they’ve gone from esoteric machine learning projects to useful products used across the world, every day. Tools like Midjourney can create highly detailed pieces of digital art in seconds, and the AI powering it gets meaningfully better every week. Technical writing, software engineering, healthcare diagnostics, and even music composition are all being automated at an alarming rate. White collar jobs are currently more at risk than blue collar jobs.

As an engineer, I find myself curating bits of code and data more than I actually write them. GitHub Copilot and Cursor autocomplete my intentions before I even finish conceptualizing them. ChatGPT steps in when the problem requires bigger picture thinking and multiple iterations. We are still in act one of the artificial intelligence revolution, and by act two, I’m not so sure my job will even exist anymore. I will have my own personal Jarvis to do the heavy lifting, and my only value as a human being will be my ability to reason and curate the output of the machine.

Even as I write this blog post in my Visual Studio Code IDE, Copilot frantically attempts to autocomplete my thoughts, albeit with mixed results. Its prose is formulaic, lacks personality, and produces some truly corny slop. Our value as human beings is not the knowledge we amass, or the algorithms we can write, but our ability to reason, think critically, and create something new when nothing like it existed before.

Artificial Intelligence (a clever marketing term for machine learning) is not a replacement for human creativity. It is a tool that can be used to augment our own creativity, and likely won’t replace it. As Michio Kaku once called it, AI is a “glorified tape recorder”. It is a plagiarism engine that can convincingly stitch together pieces of existing work, but it cannot create something new.

For now, at least.