Springer Nature’s journal AI & SocietyGueorgui Vassilev
Human intelligence, from the perspective of evolutionary
biology and psychology, is not infinite genius but the fragile
capacity of organisms to adapt to an ever-changing environment to survive and procreate.
Creativity is the instrument by which the human species invents solutions to face the unknown, the unexpected, the mysterious. It is not mere novelty, but a survival tool—audacity bound to necessity.
Yet creativity is not limitless, a gift without measure, a bound-
less domain of human freedom. Humans may challenge the
divine and the natural, but such defiance rarely comes with-
out grave consequences.
Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is intelligence only by
name. It does not create. It processes. It is a set of algorithms
trained on the immense treasure of human knowledge and
ingenuity, producing in efficient ways results defined by
goals set by humans. But here lies the dilemma: the goals
are not set by humankind as a whole but by those in power.
The market, the corporation, the state—they determine the
ends to which AI is bent. In this sense, AI is not antihuman
because it might one day “think” like us. It is antihuman
because, in its present deployment, it risks becoming a tool
of domination and destruction whose efficiency already out-
strips the most devastating weapons of the past.
AI is neither true intelligence nor true creativity. It is an
imitation of both, hollowed of meaning.
To call this “intelligence” is an insult to the very struggle
that defines the human creative act—the risk, the failure, the
long wrestle with mystery that gives rise to art and science.
True intelligence is sacred because it binds human fragility
to meaning, responsibility, and the fragile balance of life.
Algorithmic recombination does not share this burden. It
only imitates the surface of thought while hollowing out
its soul.
1 Case one: the death of education
Universities now confront a flood of AI-generated student essays. Some administrators shrug, some even accommodate. But let us state the truth bluntly: when universities tolerate machine-written essays, they are not simply overlooking plagiarism.
They are sanctioning the death of education as a space for human thought. The purpose of writing is not to produce a passable text. It is to think, to struggle with language until one’s own ideas take shape. When that struggle is outsourced to a machine, what shrivels is not the quality of the prose but the human mind itself.
2 Case two: the hollowing of creative professions
Consider the creative industries. AI-generated design templates now saturate online marketplaces. What once required
skill, imagination, and apprenticeship is reduced to clicking through prefabricated options.
The profession of design is hollowed out, its vocation replaced by cheap abundance.
Professions requiring human empathy are reduced to the
emotionless efficiency of chatbots. This is not democratization of creativity. It is its liquidation. It leaves us drowning in sterile sameness while real creative labor becomes economically unviable.
3 Case three: the culture of filler
Corporations embrace AI content mills that can churn out
endless streams of “copy” for websites, reports, and marketing. The result is a flood of textual filler that drowns meaning itself.
Human expression—once tied to risk, truth, and
purpose—becomes indistinguishable from automated chatter.
AI content mills flood culture with endless filler, reducing expression to automated chatter and drowning meaning
in noise. It is not creativity at scale, but nihilism at scale.
4 Creativity as search for meaning
Viktor Frankl insisted that the defining feature of the human
being is the search for meaning. Unlike pleasure or power,
meaning cannot be outsourced. It demands that each person
confront the weight of existence, the suffering and responsibility of being alive. Human creativity is sacred precisely because it is the vehicle of this search.
Every poem, theory, or invention is, at bottom, a struggle to articulate meaning in the face of mortality and finitude.
AI cannot partake in this struggle. It cannot suffer, cannot
hope, cannot reach for meaning in despair. It can simulate
the forms of expression, but never the human cry for purpose
that animates true creation. To confuse the two is not merely
a conceptual mistake. It is a desecration of the sacred core
of creativity.
5 The Homo Deus delusion
Yuval Harari has popularized the vision of humans striving to become Homo Deus, godlike beings transcending biological limits through technology.
But this ambition is not progress—it is hubris disguised as destiny. To dream of becoming gods is to forget what creativity actually is: not the fantasy of limitless power, but the fragile act of creating
within limits.
The Homo Deus project imagines that we can abolish suffering, mortality, and finitude through technological mastery.
Yet it is precisely these conditions that give creativity its
importance and dignity. Without limits, creativity curdles
into play without consequence. Without death, no meaning.
Without risk, no art. The dream of becoming Homo Deus is,
therefore, not the apotheosis of creativity but its negation. It
replaces the search for meaning with the fantasy of control,
thereby stripping creation of its sacredness.
6 Creativity with limits
The sacredness of creativity lies not in limitless rebellion but
in fidelity to humanness. We are not gods creating ex nihilo,
nor are we mere imitators of divine perfection. We are co-
creators, shaping meaning within the bounds of nature and
necessity.
True creativity respects these limits even as it dares to defy them. It is rebellion tempered by responsibility, novelty bound by care.
As Foucault put it, critique is “the art of not being gov-
erned quite so much.” That spirit should guide us today, but
with a sharper edge: critique must resist not only states and
markets but also the creeping governance of machines. To
accept algorithmic counterfeit as creativity is to consent to
being governed more than ever—by goals we did not set, in
a language not our own.
7 The warning
Let us not flatter ourselves. If we embrace AI’s counterfeit
as creativity, we are not liberating human agency but preparing its grave. The moment we outsource creation, we abandon it—and what is abandoned withers. Imagination, once surrendered, does not lie dormant; it decays. Do not be
surprised, then, when your own inner voice shrinks to the
scale of the machine’s output.
That, finally, is the curmudgeonly truth worth defending: intelligence is not a trick of algorithms but a sacred
achievement of the human spirit—divine in its depth, but
only so long as it remains rooted in our fragile, risk-laden,
creative nature.
Curmudgeon Corner Curmudgeon Corner is a short opinionated column on trends in technology, arts, science and society, commenting on issues of concern to the research community and wider society. Whilst the drive for super-human intelligence promotes potential benefits to wider society, it also raises deep concerns of existential risk, thereby highlighting the need for an ongoing conversation between technology and society. At the core of Curmudgeon concern is the question:
What is it to be human in the age of the AI machine? -Editor.
Author contributions The concept development is entirely mine.
Data availability No datasets were generated or analysed during the
current study.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests.
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