Author – Xiaoyu Wang

Creativity as a Unique Human Value

Creativity is often considered as an “intuition” or “talent” and can’t be easily interpreted in a logical way (Wu et al. 2021). The creative industries often refer to graphic design, film, music, video games, fashion, advertising, media or entertainment industries (Howkins 2002), related to the extraordinary thinking by supreme creative individuals (Weisberg 2006). However, creativity actually lies in all creative activities, from the arts to science, from everyday life to industry production. Today, creativity is considered to be a crucial competency (Binkley et al. 2012). Boden (2004), who pioneered the field of philosophy of cognitive science, offers the definition “Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable”. With the help of language, people used the creative process in art and technology, making creativity “one of the most striking features of the human species”, since at least 40,000 years ago (Carruthers 2002, p. 226). Creativity in today’s sense is at the heart of human endeavour, shaping various fields including education, art and healthcare (Esling and Devis 2020; Farina et al. 2024; Tredinnick and Laybats 2023).

At the individual level, creativity may help and empower people to find satisfaction and lead fulfilling lives (Kind and Kind 2007). It can equip people with problem-solving skills, enrich their lives, support the capability to cope, develop and grow in response to change in a fast-changing society (Newton and Newton 2014). With the call for creativity to be an essential part of education from organisations with a global economic perspective, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2004, 2019), it has come to be seen as a general core competency underlying learning (Nordin & Sundberg, 2016). According to Rosenstock and Riordan (2017), creativity is gradually moving away from being seen as a fringe topic or a luxury in curricula, but instead as a key capability which should be fostered in all subject areas.

AI Becomes a Co-creator

The relationship between humans and machines was largely transactional during the early age of computing (Geroimenko, 2025), with a focus on building effective and intuitive systems for users to complete specific tasks and the interaction was under structured commands with a clear divide between them (MacKenzie 2024). Correspondingly, the role of technology in the creative process was limited to their material presence (Glăveanu, 2020), their properties as support tools for creativity (Shneiderman, 2007) and their ability to expand creative activities that come with new symbols, procedures and heuristics (Pedota & Piscitello, 2022). Most of the time, technology acts like a creativity-enhancing tool to help people supplement their original ideas, thoughts and designs. For example, photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator support the creative process with their preset features and functions that allow users to add variations and different effects to their artwork.

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) can overturn this anthropocentric view as it opens a frontier of shared creativity between humans and machines, becoming a co-creator with individuals, instead of simply acting like a creativity-enhancing tool (Grilli & Pedota, 2024). Shifting from merely responding to commands to generate outputs for users, generative AI performs a transformative leap in actively engaging with the user to accomplish tasks, co-create projects, envision and expand upon human input (Vinchon et al. 2023). LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini can contribute to the creative process by giving ideas, directions, inspirations and even draft concepts at the very beginning stage, to brainstorm together with humans. The transition from conventional interaction to creative collaboration brings huge impacts to human creative processes, embedding creativity directly into the human-computer relationship (Mackay 2023), where both human intention and machine innovation combine to produce novel outputs. This also implies that creative ideas may be seen as the outcome of a symbiotic interaction between human and AI, since these ideas can arise not only from an individual aided by technological artefacts, but also from a technological artefact aided by an individual (Runco & Jaeger, 2012, Grilli & Pedota, 2024). Therefore, it would be more meaningful to focus on how AI is changing creative processes and how humans can act accordingly to prevent misuses of the technology from happening (Rafner et al. 2023).

The change in technology becoming a co-creator rather than a supportive tool can also be divided into more detail from a cognitive point of view. Grilli and Pedota (2024) argue that AI is likely to change the relative importance of convergent thinking versus divergent thinking since machines no longer work as an assistant but actively participate in creative endeavours. As AI can obtain and synthesise data and information with high quality and efficiency, the importance of convergent thinking in creating novel ideas will decrease, which makes divergent thinking much more relevant and decisive for a matter of comparative advantage in the creative process. The radical and different solutions offered by AI can compensate for human heuristics and divergent thinking since our minds are usually bounded by rationality (Simon, 1991). However, it is likely to remain a prerogative of human agency as the creativity enacted by AI is restricted to specific tasks and ensembles of information, while human creativity is usually enacted by the encounter of very distant and ‘divergent’ domains (Kennedy et al., 2022). Therefore, with the support for divergent thinking from AI, humans should emphasize more on their ability to think outside the box and integrate knowledge from distant aspects to enhance creativity and make it more proficient (Grilli & Pedota, 2024).

In all, by understanding how AI is changing our creative processes, we can better reach the balance between supporting meaningful human agency and ensuring that the rapidly developing technology enhances rather than replaces human creativity, while leveraging the strong power brought by AI in creative activities.

References:

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Wu, Z., Ji, D., Yu, K., Zeng, X., Wu, D., Shidujaman, M. (2021). AI Creativity and the Human-AI Co-creation Model. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Theory, Methods and Tools. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78462-1_13.

Further reading/watching/listening:

Books & Articles:

Sawyer, R. K., & Henriksen, D. (2024). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford university press.

Yu, W. F. (2025). AI as a co-creator and a design material: Transforming the design process. Design Studies, 97, 101303.

Image Attribution

Generated by: Gemini 2.5 Flash

Date: 10/11/2025

Prompt: https://gemini.google.com/share/73e73cce8574