Is Creative Isolation Inevitable In the AI Era?
As our creative tools increasingly give us the power to make things alone, are we designing out he conditions that allow ideas to emerge between us?
I think creativity happens in the white space between ideas. One person brings the nub of an idea. A sketch. A demo. Somebody else responds to it. They misunderstand it, extend it, resist it, flip it, or connect it to something new.
Neither person knows where they are going. But the idea changes. Something emerges between them.
This happens everywhere. Between musicians playing together. In writers' rooms and rehearsal spaces. Between directors, performers and editors. Between designers and engineers. In kitchens, studios, workshops, laboratories, agencies and production teams. It is what happens when different perspectives have the space, permission, or opportunity to effect what happens next.
What I'm wondering is whether the technologies now offering the prospect of unprecedented individual creative power are inadvertently giving us fewer opportunities for these moments of creative inspiration, collaborative discoveries, and emergent creativity to happen.
Allowing creativity to emerge
One of the reasons I find The Beatles: Get Back so fascinating is that you can see this happening in real time. There are three moments I think about a lot.
One is Paul McCartney writing Get Back through force of will. The idea for the song is clearly in his mind but it's incomplete. By riffing on it out loud in the make-shift rehearsal space, George and Ringo listen in, catch on, and start getting involved. The idea develops between them. The song emerges.
The second is Ringo at the piano playing Octopus's Garden. George's ears prick up and starts exploring it with him, making suggestions, taking the little ditty seriously. It's Ringo's song but it is allowed to become something through somebody else applying their attention and imagination to it. And the other is Billy Preston arriving to jam with the Beatles (as you do). As soon as he sits down he changes the mood, the sound, and the energy of the session.
Who knows what would have happened if it was just Paul on his laptop with Ableton. Probably something like Temporary Secretary (I jest. I love Temporary Secretary).
That's the bit I'm interested in. The emergent creativity that happens in the space between people. There are individual ideas in all three cases. Individual ability matters enormously. But the creative genius isn't owned by one person alone.
Can we create tools, spaces, platforms, and conditions that enable and encourage this to happen?
From genius to scenius
Now let's zoom out and talk about another great thinker on creativity, Brian Eno, who has a word for a related phenomenon: Scenius.
He developed the idea of Scenius partly in response to the way art history tends to concentrate around a handful of exceptional individuals.
His argument is those individuals, the 'creative geniuses', tend to emerge from much richer creative communities. Other artists, critics, technicians, venues, audiences, curators, collectors, friends, and competitors coming together, exchanging ideas, and inspiring action.
He describes scenius as the creative intelligence of a whole community. Bowie's eclectic magpie-ing of styles, scenes, culture, and communities is a good example of why this way of thinking is useful. He didn't invent glam, soul, or drum n bass. He found emergent white space between him and others.
Ideas pass between people. Techniques travel. Someone sees what somebody else is doing. One discipline influences another. People meet, borrow, challenge and recombine.
Creativity occurs across the connections between them.
Creative isolation
Which brings me to the strange contradiction in the way creative technology is currently developing.
We have never had more individual creative capability.
Write, record, produce and distribute your own music. Write, storyboard, generate, edit and release your own film. Design the identity. Build the prototype. Write the code. Create the imagery. Research the market. Make the presentation. These are superpowers in many circumstances.
Removing financial, technical and professional barriers to making things can allow people who previously couldn't participate to create, experiment and communicate their ideas. That sounds good.
But there's another effect worth noticing. Every capability we move inside the individual's workflow potentially removes a collaborative bridge.
I no longer need to speak to the illustrator. I don't have to bring the developer into the conversation yet. I can generate the music myself. I don't have to show the unfinished thing to anybody.
That is why I'm exploring creative isolation and how we can design for collaborative creativity. Creative isolation is what happens when fewer other minds, disciplines, and ways of seeing have the opportunity to alter an idea while it is still being formed.
The lost collision
The problem isn't that another human would necessarily execute the task better. It's that another human might do something I wasn't expecting at all.
From my experience, particularly my time working in animation and immersive, this emergent creativity was a crucial part of the process. The technical person might tell the creative person that their idea is impossible, leading to workarounds that are much stranger, unique, or daring.
I worry that for the coming generations of creators, that approach might seem foreign, unattainable, or even unwanted due to the ease of other options. Sometimes the friction is the creative process.
Whatever happened to the muse?
We once reached for the word muse to describe inspiration that seemed to arrive from somewhere outside ourselves.
Something unexpected enters the process. An encounter. A person. An observation. An influence. A half-heard melody. Something apparently appears from nowhere and changes the direction of the work.
There is therefore something wonderfully strange about one of the newest manifestations of personal AI.
Meta has called its personal AI agent Muse. It is explicitly designed around the individual: learning what matters to you, taking tasks off your plate and helping you pursue your personal goals.
Meta is extending it into the physical world through Muse Charm, a small companion device that has been widely compared to a Tamagotchi. The muse was something that disrupted you from outside. Now Muse learns you. That doesn't make the technology bad. A capable personal agent could be enormously useful. But it is an illustration of the direction of travel. More capability concentrated around the individual. More of the world mediated through a personalised technological companion. Fewer dependencies on other people. Individualisation at industrial scale.
If that becomes the dominant model through which we invest in creative technology, I think we risk missing something important.
What if we designed for the space between people?
We can design technology for collective creative capability, I'm sure of it. But I'd like to explore what that really could look like.
Systems, spaces, platforms and tools deliberately intended to create more productive interaction between people. Tools where several people manipulate the same evolving idea. Processes that help creative and technical people find a shared language. Platforms that expose people to perspectives outside their existing creative orbit. Interfaces that allow people with dramatically different levels of skill to create together. Spaces that encourage improvisation rather than simply execution.
There are obvious accessibility benefits underlying all that too. Assistive. Inclusive. Intuitive. I'm intrigued to see how this area develops.
Parallel tracks
Perhaps the important thing is intent. There is enormous value in continuing to develop technologies that empower individuals.
Someone who previously needed a huge amount of funding and resource and a team of specialists to express an idea may soon be able to explore it themselves. But it shouldn't be the only track. Alongside the race to answer: 'How much more can one person do?' I'd like to see much more experimentation around another question: 'What could we help people do together?'
How do we create more opportunities for different minds to collide? How do we connect different creative disciplines? How do we allow people to affect one another's work before it becomes fixed? How do we create the conditions for scenius?
The messy, emergent spark between minds is not an inefficiency we should engineer away. It might be one of the most valuable things we have.
I'm exploring these ideas through Green Raven with the development of new projects, research strands, and thinking. If you'd like to get involved, I'm actively seeking opportunities to take these thoughts into action from the underlying themes to the potential solutions. Get in touch: ian@greenraven.co.uk
