Machines have long been beating us at chess, calculating faster than any human, and tirelessly managing processes in factories. But the last decade has brought a truly unexpected turn: artificial intelligence has begun to enter the world of creativity. It composes music, writes poetry, generates paintings, and even participates in art exhibitions. And the question increasingly arises: can a machine be a real artist?
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What is creative thinking?
Before answering the main question, let’s figure out what it means to be creative. Creativity is the ability to generate new, original, and valuable ideas, and to express them in a form that evokes emotion, reflection, or admiration. Intuition, experience, feelings, and even mistakes are all involved in this process. Human creativity is not always logical – that’s its magic.
How does AI create art?
AI does not “create” in the usual sense — it analyzes huge amounts of data (pictures, music, texts), identifies patterns, and then generates new content that looks original. For example:
Midjourney and DALL E create images based on text descriptions.
AIVA composes Mozart-style music or 80s-style electronics.
ChatGPT writes poetry, stories, sketches, and even film scripts.
And all this — without inspiration, without experiences, without personal history. Only statistics, algorithms, and probabilities.
Is art a technique or an emotion?
Here begins the main philosophical confrontation. On the one hand, AI really does create visually and technically high-quality things. Some works look so expressive that they are difficult to distinguish from human ones. Paintings generated entirely by AI have already been sold at auctions for tens of thousands of dollars.
On the other hand, critics say: art is not a form, but an internal experience. A person puts personal pain, joy, memories, doubts, and faith into creativity. A machine is just a data transformer. It can reproduce style, but it is not capable of experiencing. It imitates, but does not feel.
Examples of AI success in creativity
The portrait “Edmond de Belamy”, created by AI from the French collective Obvious, was sold at Christie’s auction for $432,500.
Music albums created with the participation of AI are already appearing on Spotify and other platforms.
The robot poet ChatGPT wins prizes at competitions where the jury does not suspect that the text was not written by a person.
