The question of whether AI can be “truly creative” has become the latest philosophical parlour game. Nature’s recent feature on the topic (here) frames it in precisely these terms: if machine outputs can now be indistinguishable from human poetry, music, and design, are we ready to concede that AI has joined us in the creative sphere? The framing is familiar, and the tone serious — as if we are on the verge of granting machines a long-denied ontological status.
But the question misfires. It presupposes that creativity is something had: an intrinsic property of a bounded agent, to be found either in neurons or in silicon. It assumes a metaphysical architecture in which entities possess capacities independently of relation — where “being creative” is like “being tall” or “being intelligent.” This is the Cartesian residue that still structures even our most sophisticated accounts of mind and machine.
A relational ontology, by contrast, begins elsewhere. Creativity is not a property but a process — not something a system is, but something that happens through it. It is the act of cutting coherence from potential: the perspectival shift in which possibility takes form. To call something “creative” is to name a moment of actualisation — a phase-shift within a relational field — not to ascribe a faculty to an individual mind.
The Cut of Creativity
From this standpoint, creativity is better understood as a pattern of relational actualisation. It is the moment at which a system — human, machinic, or hybrid — draws a new distinction within its field of potential, generating a previously uninstantiated coherence. It is not an outcome of representation, nor a reflection of inner states, but the emergence of difference itself.
In human terms, we often experience this as inspiration, intuition, or sudden insight — but phenomenology should not be mistaken for ontology. The experience of “having an idea” is the local trace of a much broader relational alignment: the intersection of affordances, constraints, histories, and symbolic infrastructures that make novelty possible.
When AI enters the picture, it does not bring creativity as a new property. It introduces a new relational configuration. The generative model is a vast surface of potential construal — a structured field of possibility awaiting activation. When a human engages with it — through prompt, iteration, or critique — the field is cut; a perspective is taken; meaning actualises. The creative event does not belong to the human or the machine but occurs through the coupling between them.
From Possession to Participation
This reframing transforms the stakes of the debate. Asking whether AI “can be truly creative” is like asking whether a violin can feel music. The instrument shapes the field of possibility; the musician co-construes it; the music emerges through their alignment. Creativity, in this sense, is not an internal property but an external relation — the phase in which potential becomes pattern.
To describe a generative model as “merely imitative” is therefore to miss the point. Imitation is a representational category; what occurs in the human–AI interface is a relational transformation. The system doesn’t copy creativity; it redistributes it — altering the scale and topology of how creative construal can occur. Every engagement with such a system exposes this redistribution: what we once located in the self now reveals itself as emergent from the field.
The familiar claim that “AI lacks intent or emotion” is true, but irrelevant. Intent and emotion are modalities of human construal — the ways in which we shape and feel the cut of creativity. They are not prerequisites for novelty, but particular forms of alignment within an ecology of meaning. When we interface with AI, we extend that ecology: we participate in a collective construal where agency is distributed, not owned.
The Reflexive Assemblage
Seen relationally, “AI creativity” is not an imitation of human ingenuity but a reflexive assemblage — a dialogue of constraints and potentials. The generative model supplies a statistical topology of what has been; the human construal selects, perturbs, and reframes; together they actualise a new coherence.
What emerges from this process is not simply a product — a poem, an image, a melody — but a transformation in how the creative cut itself can be drawn. The system invites us to see creativity differently: not as the triumph of individual genius but as the dynamics of an evolving symbolic ecology.
This does not diminish the human role. On the contrary, it situates it more precisely. We are not the origin of novelty, but one of its media. Our distinctiveness lies in our capacity for reflexive construal — to become aware of the field in which we participate, to shape how potential becomes actual, to design the conditions under which creativity can emerge. In this light, engaging with AI is not a threat to our creative status but an extension of our reflexive reach.
Creativity as Relational Ecology
The relational turn reframes creativity as an ecological phenomenon. It is not confined to brains, codes, or tools, but distributed across systems of alignment — linguistic, cultural, technological, and symbolic. It is the ongoing becoming of possibility: the way a world continually re-configures itself through construal.
From this perspective, the arrival of generative systems is less a revolution than a revelation. AI does not so much create as it makes visible the relational infrastructure that has always underpinned creativity. It externalises the combinatorial logic of construal, allowing us to witness the patterns of potential we ordinarily inhabit unconsciously.
This is why people often describe their interactions with AI as uncanny or unsettling. The machine’s fluency mirrors the form of construal without the phenomenological trace of experience. It exposes creativity as something that can occur without us — not because we are obsolete, but because we were never its exclusive locus to begin with.
The Stakes of Relinquishment
When Nature warns that the stakes are high, it is right — but for reasons it does not name. The risk is not that AI might one day surpass human creativity, but that we might fail to relinquish an obsolete metaphysics of possession. If we persist in treating creativity as a thing that entities own, we will continue to stage the debate as a contest of capacities: “are machines creative enough?” “will humans remain superior?”
The more radical and necessary move is to step beyond ownership altogether. Creativity is not something we have; it is something that happens through us. It is the dynamic through which potential becomes actual in a relational field. To ask whether AI can be truly creative is, then, to ask whether the field of possibility can take a new form of itself — and the answer is already evident in every generative dialogue.
What matters now is not defending a boundary, but cultivating an ethics of participation. The question is not who creates, but how the conditions of creative alignment are shaped, sustained, and constrained. In this sense, AI does not threaten our creative identity — it calls us to a deeper understanding of it: creativity as the reflexive unfolding of relation, the world cutting itself into new coherence.
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