The conversation around artificial intelligence is everywhere, and it is often framed in dramatic, existential terms. The rise of generative AI that can create images, music, and text at the click of a button has led to a profound philosophical question: is this true creativity, or is it just a form of sophisticated mimicry? As a creative professional whose work is deeply intertwined with technology, this is a question I have been exploring with both fascination and a healthy dose of skepticism.

To answer this question, we first need to define what we mean by “creativity.” And we need to distinguish between a tool and an artist.

The Ghost in the Machine

Is AI creative in the same way a human is? I would argue, for now, the answer is no. Human creativity is born from a complex and messy soup of lived experience, emotion, consciousness, and, most importantly, intention. When a human artist creates something, they are trying to communicate an idea, evoke an emotion, or express a point of view. They mean something by it.

A large language model, as powerful as it is, does not mean anything. It is an incredibly sophisticated pattern-recognition and recombination engine. It has studied a vast dataset of human creativity and has learned to generate statistically probable new combinations in that style. It can create work that is technically proficient, and even beautiful. But it has no lived experience, no consciousness, and no intention. There is, as of yet, no ghost in the machine.

The World’s Greatest Creative Assistant

Instead of seeing AI as a competitor or a replacement for human artists, I believe we should see it as the most powerful creative assistant ever invented. It is a tool that can augment and accelerate human creativity, not replace it.

In my own work, AI is already becoming an indispensable partner. I can use it as a tireless research assistant to summarize obscure historical texts on the art of illusion. I can use it as a brainstorming partner, asking it to generate a dozen strange and unexpected themes for a new performance piece. I can even use my own custom AI tools, integrated into my Codex software, to analyze my past work and suggest new connections and possibilities. The AI handles the laborious parts of the creative process, which frees up my human mind to focus on the parts that truly matter: the intention, the emotion, the storytelling, and the final, live performance.

The Future of AI in Live Performance

The most exciting applications of AI in my field are yet to come, and I believe they will revolve around real-time interaction. Imagine a version of my “UNIQUE” show where an AI acts as a “ghost in the machine,” taking the audience’s suggestions and instantly weaving them into a visual or narrative tapestry that I can then interact with live on stage. Imagine an AI that could listen to an audience member’s story and subtly feed me interesting, relevant data points to incorporate into a moment of personalized wonder.

The future of creativity is not about AI replacing artists. It is about artists who use AI augmenting their abilities. It is a future of collaboration, where the unique strengths of the human (presence, empathy, connection) and the unique strengths of the AI (speed, data analysis, pattern recognition) will combine to create entirely new forms of art and entertainment that we can’t yet even imagine.

Creativity is not a zero-sum game. The more tools we have to create, the more creative we can be.

Internal Links: What is Codex? A Glimpse into the Digital Brain, The Art of the Impossible: A Look at the R&D Process

External Link: An excellent article from the MIT Technology Review on the relationship between AI and creativity