The End of Creativity

https://hugodaniel.com/posts/the-end-of-creativity/

by hugodan • 7 days ago

41 70 7 days ago

I think it's the feeling that this "superpower machine" is something that we little humans cannot compete with anyway. So we sort of trust it and use it.

mycall• 7 days ago

I look at This Is Colossal [0] and see how art and creativity is alive and fresh as ever. There is no end to creativity.

[0] https://www.thisiscolossal.com

nicbou2• 7 days ago

Nice site! I think it will always be there, but the world is noisier and noisier, and it gets hard to hear human voices.

low_tech_love• 7 days ago

You are arguing that creativity is still alive by showing creative works from before AI? I think your argument is backwards.

sixtyj• 7 days ago

I would like to share your optimism… I follow Flash Art magazine, and many other magazines about arts… to find something really nice - not extra, but nice that is not a copy of copy or empty or nihilistic - is quite hard.

After few pages at This is Colossal, Are.na, Dribbble, Deviant Art, It isn’t happiness etc…

it is similar to millennial grey plague.

OP’s example with similar wedding videos shows trend. Pareto is everywhere.

As almost everybody can be an artist (or they think they can be :) …statistically 80% will be average/mean results.

As there are more “artists”, we are knee-deep in average.

Sometimes it is better not to do any video and give a photo book instead. :)

pnexk• 7 days ago

I also strongly think there is a decline (demand?) in appreciation for such art. Even something not critically acclaimed or featured in the prestigious (think something more regional or local) may very well go underneath unnoticed and dismissed in a culture with no effort put towards education or attention for it. The result is an absence of vital nourishing/reflection for many a soul.

overgard5• 7 days ago

I think a use case like that is still novel for non-tech people at the moment, but as the novelty wears off people are going to get sick of it pretty quickly and I think the social norm is going to settle on it being considered tacky. It's like using Comic Sans for a flyer. A lot of people will still do it, but a lot of people are going to roll their eyes.

Also, this is the kind of thing that you can't expect honest feedback on. IE, if your friends actually thought "this is pretty awful" they're not likely to say it, for the same reason you wouldn't remark that your friend's baby is ugly or whatnot.

coldstartops• 7 days ago

What is driving us towards these tools?

Why did your group use the AI, how would you answer the Conclusion questions?

As an anectdote: I like low-fi punk music because of the energy, and low skill for entry level. So when I started playing music, I went for this genre. I used it as a hobby over 10 years as it brought me joy, and enjoyed the process, without the grind for leveling up the skill.

It's also fun to do low effort things that are good enough. Much more fun than being l33t.

nicbou2• 7 days ago

people loved them

There's the thing. AI creates something that looks like quality, especially to an undiscerning audience. It ticks all the boxes of a professionally-made creation: composition, lighting, bokeh and so on. It takes humans a lot of time and practice to get to that level.

The problem is the lack of human intent. A stranger who never met the groom and bride could have created the same thing. It's shallow and impersonal, like a Hallmark card without a note in it.

There will always be creative people, and once we've seen enough AI-generated slop, we will come to value anything that doesn't look like it.

63• 7 days ago

Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.

frollogaston5• 7 days ago

I can't even imagine doing this. It's not that hard to make a special video once you've collected the source material. It won't look professional at all, but nobody cares about that at a wedding.

JohnFen• 7 days ago

if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended

As would I. Not only would that demonstrate they don't care, but it would also indicate that this "friend" simply doesn't know me at all, and therefore is an acquaintance at best.

pj_mukh• 7 days ago

What if I used no AI in writing it i.e. it was all heartfelt but used AI to literally edit a video together? The author says

"Two videos, with different stories, shared so many similarities that most people thought they were roughly the same.

Same similar tone of voiceover with cadence. Same cutscenes of flying over empty beaches, and navigating forest trees and stars/universe, and same narrative: after years of evolution scientists have yet to discover the power of such love with a national geographic tone in both (one of the videos even started with that logo)."

Which to me, just means the manually done cutscenes was a waste of time? In fact in most situations pre-AI you'd foist this task on "that one friend" who's good with Movie Maker or hire a hobby videographer. Now I offload to AI, why is that bad?

I think having Claude wholesale write a wedding speech is obviously silly, but the rest doesn't seem so black and white, just more Ikea-fication of consumer art.

javascriptfan69• 7 days ago

Which to me, just means the manually done cutscenes was a waste of time? In fact in most situations pre-AI you'd foist this task on "that one friend" who's good with Movie Maker or hire a hobby videographer. Now I offload to AI, why is that bad?

Because there's no value in something that you offload to AI without effort.

If it's something that anyone could do, without skill, why would anyone be impressed by that?

frollogaston5• 7 days ago

"The person of our group that championed it used AI for the script/narrative"

beej713• 7 days ago

I wonder how many parents are looking forward to the day their kids can just talk to a computer and have an LLM produce all the works. That'll be something to proudly hang on the fridge, yeah?

Waterluvian2• 7 days ago

This thread inspired me and I made this prompt for you:

“A comic of a kid and his father standing in the kitchen. The father is pinning a page to the fridge with a magnet while the kid stands there, proudly watching. The page is an image depicting a comic of a kid and his father standing in the kitchen as the father pins a page to the fridge with a magnet.”

Edit: I decided that without effort, a gift can fall a little flat. So I took the time to process the prompt for you. I hope you like it! https://ibb.co/PsdDjDLy

kazinator• 7 days ago

On the gift scale, an AI thing is worse than an envelope with cash.

handwarmers• 7 days ago

I remember the day when my dad gave me $100 in an envelope. One of the worst days of my life.

simondotau4• 7 days ago

Ironically, I think that serves as an absurdist refutation of the argument. On the gift scale, the question is appropriateness, a measure of sacrifice, and a measure of thoughtfulness. Personally I'd find some kind of AI-personalised gift to be slightly less worse than buying me a Gift™ from a major chain store.

cherrylimesoda• 7 days ago

If you don’t learn how to play every instrument, sing, and use your private plane to fly on location to film the music video then your soul ain’t even in it bro

I need millions spent, rainforests burned down, office complexes erected, ecosystems and lives ruined, layoffs - or it didn’t happen bro. It’s just AI

kibwen• 7 days ago

It's utterly mortifying. I would have been having an out-of-body experience if I was in attendance at such a wedding. If it had been my own wedding, I'd have been livid at the insult.

fuzzythinker• 7 days ago

If someone says "if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended" and not spell out what TFA means and make me ask ai, I'll be shaking my head

pitchlatte• 7 days ago

AI is merely exposing an already existing tendency. the creative output of the average non professional will always tend to the mean. it’s a tautology, that’s what the mean is. professional artists are treasured most of all for their _taste_, which tends to be novel and deliberate. the input of good taste into the Gaussian cloud of the average pulls it into new directions. the idea is in fact to improve the mean, that’s artistic education on a societal scale.

on the subject of AI, though: it definitely aggravates this trend.

alwa• 7 days ago

To echo your point—the “from the dawn of existence, up to this moment” framing seems to me a fairly familiar way for amateurs to reach for gravitas, in wedding speeches in particular, and especially between partners both of a certain social milieu…

I wonder how much creativity matters for this type of work.

I’m reminded of iPhoto’s little chintzy auto-generated reminiscence movies. Nobody confuses those “Ken Burns Effect” auto-slideshows with, well, Ken Burns’ work—much less art or creativity—but I still find myself moved to see my memories all hookered up in that format sometimes.

overgard5• 7 days ago

I think for something like this, creativity is actually a detriment. You're not going to win an award for an extra-special video, you don't really want to draw attention away from the couple towards your clever editing you know?

overgard5• 7 days ago

I don't really like describing it as "taste", but I'll roll with it. (I dislike it because it's sort of an elite-coded rich person phrase in my experience. Also, everyone THINKS they have taste.)

The thing about taste is that it's not something that's in-built, it's something you develop. Through working on things and failing. I don't think you can develop good taste by hitting regen a bunch or extra-special prompting.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 days ago

No, it's built-in. Some people just have it. Take a room full of people, give them the same training, a few might stand out and get better, most will hit a ceiling, some will clearly have no ability at all.

People who have native abilities and persistence are the ones who get labelled talented.

You may be right that AI gen doesn't count as persistence. It's too early to tell on that. But I'm fairly sure that there's a difference between people who click regen robotically and people who review, steer, criticise, think, and then hit regen, with a very deliberate aim in mind.

simondotau4• 7 days ago

I think if AI has taught us anything, it’s that we over-indexed on human creativity in the first place. True creativity is rare, and often accidental.

overgard5• 7 days ago

It might be rare, but it's anything but accidental. Real creative people work hard on it. It's why they find AI so offensive.

simondotau4• 7 days ago

I don't mean to be rude, only to provide Vulcan-esque observation. It's my observation that many "real creative" people spend most of their time permutating across a defined landscape of prior creative discoveries, creating derivatives of their own prior work. There's nothing wrong with that (and it's good that they reap the benefits of that) but that's what I mean when I say it's rare.

Conversely, AI, in absolutely everything it does, because of how it works, is literally average. Middle-of-the-road. Mainstream. Safe. It is the antithesis of creativity. Anything it does that seems creative is really just novelty factor. Any "real creative" should not be intimidated by this. Any "real creative" would not be intimidated by this.

lnrd• 7 days ago

I mean, video montages of pictures for birthdays/weddings/whatever were never creative to begin with. Before AI they were just some random template downloaded from a website or backed-in some editing software (I remember so many birthday montage videos made with Windows Movie Maker that looked all the same).

People love these not because they are creative or good executed, but because they see the pictures and the story of the people they love.

beej713• 7 days ago

I think something half-baked by a non-expert hold more valuable human touch than the most perfect machine-generated result ever could. Not even in the same ballpark.

skippyfish2• 7 days ago

It's a weird title. AI lets ordinary people feel more creative than before. It's largely an illusion because of the problem outlined in the article: every video, image, blog post, or book written by AI is very same-y, especially if you don't start with a strong vision of your own.

But that's not the end of creativity. That's just a net increase in fake creativity. AI doesn't show up at your place and break all your brushes and easels. If you were a creative person before, you are under no compulsion to use the tech. My artist and writer friends have no plan to.

Now, the situation positively sucks if you're making money on commission, because you now have to compete with practically-free slop that, to most people, is good enough to put on a t-shirt. So I think it will have a negative impact on artists' incomes. But that's a separate story.

seba_dos1• 7 days ago

So I think it will have a negative impact on artists' incomes.

Creativity essentially becoming a hobby for already wealthy people isn't exactly "the end of creativity", but it isn't that far from it either.

skippyfish2• 6 days ago

To be fair, that's what it was for most of history: artists were bankrolled by wealthy patrons, for their own enjoyment. Artists making money by selling directly to consumers is a very recent innovation (although we all grew up in that reality and we're fond of it).

etchalon• 7 days ago

I don't understand that point of the story.

It's essentially, "We both used the same iMovie template because neither of us are creative."

hegelguy• 7 days ago

The vows were also AI generated.

beej713• 7 days ago

And a computer would make a more efficient and less error-prone officiant.

jongjong• 7 days ago

The creative part was only the subject matter. The idea of making a video around "the 3 gifts" is itself kind of creative but fine-grained creativity has been lost.

It reminds me of the meme which shows a before and after of different company logos from like 15 years ago vs now... And now all the company logos look essentially the same; very similar fonts and colors.

People are afraid of creative designs because they are terrified of being judged. People don't want to step out of line.

It's like in a company environment; there are often many unspoken rules and taboos; if someone breaks them, they fall from grace rapidly.

These rules and taboos exist to preserve the structural integrity of the organization. A fragile organization needs lots of rules and taboos to be in place in order to remain cohesive. The people who lead these organizations create the rules and taboos which will allow them to stay in charge. People who don't adhere to the unspoken rules are quickly removed, often with the implicit consent of all group members who are themselves captive to the same rules and taboos and who eventually learn to pride themselves on compliance.

l33tbro• 7 days ago

"End of creativity". Nice bait.

If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.

Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.

trhway• 7 days ago

Everyday creativity is aggressively regressing to a mean.

I don't see it that way. I see it as the routine and toil that we perceived as everyday creativity and professional work is getting compressed out like repetitive values and patterns out of a data set - that isn't surprising giving that the core nature of AI training is encouraging pattern recognition/generalization and producing internally de-facto a compressor and a decompressor as a result.

A human may have seen 10 instances of something with minor variations - and would think that is creative. AI after seeing it 1000000 times and generalizing accordingly - this is a recipe for producing a 1000 more with desired variations according to the specification.

That naturally doesn't end creativity. It just raises the perceived bar, which really has always been there, for what is real creativity.

geedy• 7 days ago

Why are the creators giving away creative decision making and then complaining about us collectively losing creativity?

I am a and work alongside AI native creatives every day and the decisions we make still are our own.

I decide, AI executes (mostly, far faster than I can).

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 days ago

No, it's just like whenever something driven by media achieves a mean. Has happened before, will happen again.

At some point, outliers will appear. Most likely individual [human] creatives. They will create media that deviates from the mean.

Some will be great, and make the authors/artists successful. Some will be emetic garbage, and go down in flames.

Right now, I'm working on an app that has a fairly decent design language that was provided by a professional [human] designer. It's version 2. I don't have access to him, this time, so I have to make the changes, myself. I have a decent background in visual arts, myself, so I am able to do it, but the important thing, is to keep his [human] vision intact.

Someone I work with, keeps giving me designs developed by ChatGPT. They are ... not ideal. Pretty much middle-of-the-road milquetoast, that has no real soul. I'm trying to figure out how to bridge the basic interaction ideas of the suggestions (which are actually not bad), with the existing design language.

fitsumbelay• 7 days ago

when photography first dropped in the late 19th century it was also referred to as the enemy of creativity and it 50+ years for it to be recognized as a legit art form.

That said, some people like taking snapshots.

CompoundEyes2• 7 days ago

People are just trying stuff out! In the mid 90s I received several homemade clipart color inkjet greeting cards from relatives that had just gotten a computer. Trend didn’t last too long.

Papazsazsa• 7 days ago

One of my favorite family photos is us standing in front of a big banner we made with dot matrix printer celebrating my grandparents 50th (this must have been in the mid-late 90s).

It was so incredible to me at the time as a very young man, there was even fonts! I think it was Print Shop Deluxe for Windows 3.1/95.

CompoundEyes2• 7 days ago

I get it. That’s awesome ^_^

TrackerFF• 7 days ago

I have a theory: People are are less critical to GenAI, slop even, if it is content that is directly related to them.

For example, if a friend generates some silly AI video or photo of you or other, you're less likely to act negatively to that - than seeing some random slop.

This is something I've noticed a lot in different social groups of mine, like in various group chats.

smath• 7 days ago

My conclusion is that this in not the end of creativity but an increasing premium on creativity that is certified to be human made. It’s like how if I cook something from scratch that’s considered more meaningful than if I simply heated frozen food or ordered in for a guest.

wellthisisgreat• 7 days ago

Doesn't put creative effort into video editing.

Complains about end of creativity in edited video.

Ok?

frollogaston5• 7 days ago

Not even a simplification, that's pretty much the whole article

m0002• 7 days ago

Culture has been rapidly regressing to a mean long before AI.

See e.g. modern cars. Until the mid 00s, you could tell different brands apart from far away. And you could perhaps also tell a few things about the owner from the color.

Or movies. The past 20+ years of high-budget film-making has been mostly rehashing franchises and remaking what has already been made.

AI is perhaps accelerating the trend and eliminating many opportunities to witness something original (e.g. a quirky amateur wedding video). But the trend had already begun.

BigTTYGothGF• 6 days ago

you could tell different brands apart from far away

This is just the tyranny of air resistance and fuel economy.

m0002• 3 days ago

I think that's only the excuse the car makers use for being lazy and not taking design risks.

Because homogeneity also extends to the interiors (which are not affected by regulations). And of course the offered colors, where we have almost full-circled back to "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".

6stringmerc• 7 days ago

Better lesson: a LOT of people fancy themselves more creative than they are actually are, and rely on TROPES to the point of CLICHE which is shockingly obvious to actual practitioners.

This is why, nearly without fail, a writer’s First Screenplay is trash. Just…bad. The “I’ve watched a lot of movies so I’ve got this” is basically the stage of AI/LLM output, frontier level, in 2026.

That’s why Seth Rogen said every AI script he’s read was “dogshit.” And to be fair, the majority of human written scripts are dogshit too. It’s not that creativity is dead, it’s that we’re seeing the endgame of ego inflation as a cultural consumerism business model and that’s a problem not easily solved in the short term.

Please note I’m a 30 year guitarist. I have watched, without fail, thousands of postings on CraigsList for instruments purchased by parents or “music lovers” who finally decided to admit they’ll never be able to rise above below mediocrity, and sometimes they even admit it in the post. Learning to play the way I do now? My fingers bled. I had calloused fingertips I could stick a safety pin through. Guess what? Never made minimum wage because “anybody can play guitar” and club owners are scum 90% of the time. No use arguing with me, IYKYK.

jeffreyrogers• 7 days ago

I think the creative outlets will just go into different directions. For example when the camera was invented it caused a crisis in painting since now you could accurately capture reality. So then you had impressionism and all the other -isms. People deride a lot of this art now ("my kid could paint that"), but I think it genuinely was creative at the time since it hadn't been done before. And more recently artists have been returning to a more realistic style but with an emphasis on capturing things that camera can't (for example David Hockney's exploration of very large scale landscape painting or paintings where the objects although painted more or less realistically are not all presented from the same perspective).

LLMs/generative AI make a lot of things that previously required lots of skill to do well easy and accessible to more people. This creates a lot of garbage, and devalues that technical skill but it also opens up new avenues for people to explore.

Even in software engineering I think we're seeing a lot of creativity now, but it has shifted from creating frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django or systems like Linux and Postgres and towards models for how to program with agents. Although people talk about how LLMs will replace all programmers from what I see the role of the programmer has changed into something more like management. This is of course sad. It made me depressed for a bit since I'm someone who previously prided himself on his technical skill and understanding of hardware minutia, which the LLMs now understand quite well and often better than me, but it has also allowed me to work on larger problems than I could before and to build things that I previously couldn't because I didn't have the front-end knowledge to implement in timely way or the monetary resources to pay someone to do it for me.

jp57• 7 days ago

I don't think this is the death of creativity. It is just a new kind of non-creativity. He is comparing to a baseline of zero (or perhaps negative) creativity before AI.

Without AI, it's likely that neither of these videos would have been made, right? Five years ago, was it a normal thing for even one, much less two, groups of wedding guests to produce a video to show at a wedding, and if so, would the video even have been good? I mean actually good, not "it's the thought that counts, A-for-effort" good.

Isn't this like saying, "I decided to write a song for my friend's wedding, and I used AI to help me, and I played it and everyone liked it, and then someone else played the song that they had AI write for them, and it sounded just like mine, and everyone loved that too!"

Writing songs is something that's been around long enough, that if guests had made a habit of performing their original songs at weddings, even a graybeard like me would have experienced it. The baseline to compare to is no original songs were performed.

As it happens, in the weddings I've attended, I've heard exactly one such wedding song, and it was awful.

justinator• 7 days ago

You know what I've learned working weddings?

They're all basically the same. They hit the same beats. It's not where radical creativity is found. It couldn't be more of a bucketlist item just to say you did it because of social pressures to do so. No one wants surprises at a wedding. Do the ceremony, get the signature drink, sit down, boring speeches, lackluster meal, dance to Mr. Brightside, etc, etc, etc. Pay the many tens of thousands of dollars for whatever that all was. It might as well be getting Chick-Fil-A through the drive in. It's just another product to consume and it's all terrible.

The gross AI video is not the illness, it's just another symptom of the milquetoast wedding industry.

satisfice• 7 days ago

This has nothing to do with creativity ending. It sounds like those videos were utterly unremarkable, and the author is telling the story of people with low standards.

It’s as if two guest brought food from two different hamburger chains, enjoyed the food, noticed how the hamburgers were similar, and then announced the end of fine dining.

smitty1e• 7 days ago

I went to a party in Germany some years ago.

It was a birthday for someone.

What was fun was that people all offered jokes or poems or whatever.

I remarked at the quality of the offerings, and was told that there where books of content to choose from. No one has to do all the labor from scratch.

But they do have to interact, and put a bit of themselves in there.

It's an 80/20 problem, and if ine is enough of a genius to be going much past the 20% individual effort, then Bravo!

Just don't phone it in with some 99/1 AI sloppery and look an ass.

frollogaston5• 7 days ago

Remember when every YouTube video was white comic sans title on blue background, 009 Sound System music?

siberean• 6 days ago

This isn't specific to the AI era. Ten years ago these same people would have just Googled it, and never made a video at all. Today they can, and to them that's creativity. You're just seeing a different dimension of it than they are. Creativity isn't gone. It's more in demand precisely because AI regresses to the mean, as you said. People's individual biases become more valuable, not less. I wrote about this: https://substack.com/home/post/p-201247780

The End of Creativity

Related Stories