Can you really take credit for anything you’ve ever created?
Think about it. Every word you’ve ever written belongs to a language you didn’t invent. The sensibilities shaping your aesthetic judgements emerged from countless influences. The methods you follow were taught, modelled, or inherited; passed down through an unbroken lineage of teaching and learning.
Even your most original ideas are recombinations of what came before, assembled by a brain honed not for novelty but for survival. We like to believe in individual genius, yet our creativity has always been a collective act, made possible by languages we didn’t build, tools we didn’t design, and ideas gifted to us through culture, education, and chance encounters.
Your creativity has never been yours alone. It extends far beyond your skull into the minds of everyone who’s shaped your thinking, every medium you’ve worked with, every constraint that’s forced you to think differently. Creativity is not a solitary spark; it’s an ongoing conversation across time.
Once we recognise that, the myth of originality begins to unravel. What we call creativity becomes better understood as a systems phenomenon – an emergent property of human networks, technologies, and shared meaning than an individual act.
Individual creativity becomes a means of rendering the collective zeitgeist. That’s why we see phenomena like simultaneous inventions and twin films: they emerge from a shared field of possibility, the shared patterns and pressures that make ideas inevitable; what Stuart Kauffman has termed the ‘adjacent possible’.
Creativity is then constrained by the field of adjacently possible ideas within the epoch it emerges from. At the same time, its also handicapped by our biology. We are neurally limited by how much knowledge we can process, how many notions we can juggle simultaneous (apparently about seven, give or take one or two), and how quickly we can forge novel connections between disparate concepts.
To overcome those cognitive bottlenecks, we’ve learned to built tools: language to express abstraction, writing to preserve ideas, machines to externalise thought. Every creative breakthrough in history has been augmented by some kind of technology.
The creative process we use today itself is a form of augmentation; a workaround for the limits of our own neural architecture. We tackle problems sequentially because we can’t grasp every possibility at once. We record ideas because our memory is bandwidth locked. We sketch, write, and speak because cognition alone isn’t enough. Creativity, in its essence, is an elaborate adaptation to constraint.
But what happens when technology begins to augment the very architecture of the creative process? What happens when our tools don’t just extend our ability, but start to think with us?
Large language models are forcing us to ask that question. They’re reshaping our relationship with knowledge and meaning making. What once required weeks of study can now be rapidly understood. What once relied on serendipity can now be guided with intention. The generative act itself is evolving – from the slow sedimentation of understanding to the rapid recombination of ideas.
If creativity is what happens within the boundaries of biological constraint, then augmentation is a form of accessibility. What we’ve called “authentic” creativity may simply be adaptation to limitation. Defending the sanctity of traditional struggle begins to look like a kind of cognitive Stockholm syndrome – a sentimental attachment to the friction that once defined us.
Its clear that a new creative paradigm is emerging. Creative professionals are shifting from creation to curation, from production to orchestration, from making to meaning-making. The act of arranging, refining, and contextualising ideas is becoming as valuable as generating them from ‘scratch’. In this world, creativity becomes less about producing something entirely new and more about discerning what matters – how ideas connect, evolve, and acquire significance in context.
AI isn’t the end of creative expression. It will, however a fundamental reshaping of how we understand it – revealing creativity not as an isolated act of genius but as a distributed process that has always extended beyond the individual mind.