AI and the Myth of Creativity 4/4: Beyond the Creative Fortress
We thought we were original creators facing pale copiers. We discover that we too are imitation machines. So what remains of the wall that separated us from AI?
We began this journey with a duel, that of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing. We continued it by deconstructing our most cherished myths about creativity and about our own mind. We discovered that our perception is a compression, our memory a re-generation, and that our brain is, at a certain level, a calculating machine.
We thought we were original creators facing pale copiers. We discover that we too are imitation machines of prodigious complexity. So what remains of the wall we had so proudly erected between human and AI? If our own mind is already a kind of machine, where does the difference really lie? It's time to face the conclusion of our investigation and sketch the contours of a new age of creativity.
A Difference of Degree, Not of Nature
If we accept the conclusions of our previous articles – that creativity is the production of forms perceived as original (a social phenomenon) and that the process generating these forms is a calculation of compression and recombination (a computational phenomenon) – then the distinction between "human" creativity and "artificial" creativity ceases to be a difference of nature (ontological). It becomes a difference of degree, of substrate, and of style.
The airplane flies. The bird flies. They accomplish the same function. To say that the airplane doesn't "really fly" because it has no feathers is a category error. It's judging one system with the criteria of another. Similarly, the human mind and AI "create." They do it differently, with strengths and weaknesses specific to their substrate. One is slow, embodied, intuitive, laden with lived experience. The other is fast, disembodied, statistical, endowed with quasi-infinite memory. The question is not to know who is the "true" creator but to appreciate the diversity of these forms of creativity.
The ontological wall collapses. There is not on one side the sacred sanctuary of the human mind and on the other the cold mechanics of the algorithm. There is a continuum of information-processing systems, more or less complex, more or less conscious, but fundamentally of the same nature.
From Competition to Co-creation: The New Frontier
This realization changes everything. It frees us from the anxiety-inducing and sterile question of competition ("Who's going to win?"). It opens the door to an infinitely richer territory: that of co-creation. Our two forms of intelligence, one slow and embodied, the other fast and statistical, are not rivals. They are radically complementary.
In music, a musician brings their lived experience, AI its knowledge of billions of structures. The human becomes the conductor, AI their infinite orchestra. In science, a researcher has an intuition. AI analyzes millions of data points to find invisible correlations. Discovery emerges from their dialogue. In design, the creator mobilizes their sensitivity to cultural context and human needs, while AI explores thousands of formal variations in seconds.
The Unknown Horizon and the Treasure of Experience
So what remains for us? If creativity is shareable, if calculation is universal, what is our place in this new ecosystem of intelligences? The fortress reflex is to seek a last bastion, a final "properly human" quality that the machine can never attain: intentionality, wisdom, taste... But this is still a trap.
The very principle of emergence forbids us from drawing such lines in the sand. Who can assert with certainty that a system of increasing complexity won't see emerge within it forms of intentionality or wisdom specific to us, or others, radically different, that we can't even conceive? Claiming to know what AI will or will never be able to do is a form of arrogance. The truth, more humble and more dizzying, is that we are entering unknown territory.
And it is here, facing this open horizon, that our true singularity is perhaps revealed. If we can no longer define ourselves by the superiority of our capacities, we can redefine ourselves by the depth of our experience. What will always remain ours, what is inalienable, is not what we do but "what it feels like" to do it. It's the experience of being human.
The treasure is not having "better" or "unique" qualia in the universe. The treasure is living them, fully. The true response to the emergence of AI is not an intellectual arms race. It's an invitation to greater presence. To inhabit our body more intensely, to feel our emotions more deeply, to cultivate the richness of our embodied consciousness, without seeking to split or hierarchize it.
AI doesn't come to steal our humanity. It comes, by contrast, to reveal it to us, and to challenge us to embody it more authentically than ever.
Article by Matthieu Ferry, clinical psychologist, published in French in Intelligences Plurielles on 20 July 2025, adapted in English for Copryce Lab in December 2025.
Copryce Perspective
Embodying the Human in an Augmented World
If the boundary between human and machine becomes porous, if creativity is no longer our exclusive monopoly, then what becomes the specific value of the human designer?
The answer is not in competition over raw capacities (speed, volume, calculation) but in what only embodied human experience can bring: deep understanding of the emotional, cultural, and social context in which a design will live. An AI can generate a hundred variations of a logo in seconds. But it doesn’t know what it feels like to sense the pride of a founder seeing their visual identity for the first time, or the frustration of a user facing a confusing interface.
This embodied, situated, empathetic dimension of design is not incidental. It’s at the heart of what makes a design “work” in the real world. A designer who intimately understands their client, their market, their users, because they share with them a common experience of being human, possesses an irreducible advantage over any algorithm.
The emergence of AI as a creative partner rather than competitor also transforms the designer’s profession. Instead of being the one who laboriously executes variants, the designer becomes the curator, the conductor, the one who knows how to ask the right questions, who judges cultural relevance, who brings final discernment. This rise in responsibility naturally justifies increased valuation of human expertise.
Finally, the call to “live our subjective experience more fully” resonates deeply with design ethics: creating to improve the lived experience of others. A designer who cultivates their own embodied consciousness, who pays attention to their own sensations, emotions, intuitions, develops a finer sensitivity to the real (and not just stated) needs of their users.
Doesn’t AI ultimately not replace us but rather invite us to become more human, more conscious, more present? And isn’t this augmented humanity precisely what clients seek when they call upon a professional designer rather than a simple generative tool?
