The 2020s. We have tools that generate texts, images and music, and they do it quickly, efficiently, sometimes delightfully. It might seem that humans are losing their monopoly on creating. Meanwhile… the opposite is happening: creativity is becoming more valuable than ever before, though understood in a slightly different way. What way?

So what is creativity?

Ad fontes, or let us begin by agreeing on meanings is the title Beata Udzik gave her article. Let us begin there too. Following the author, though in a much simplified form, let us answer the question of what creativity is. In dictionaries, some of them rather dusty today, we read that it is a trait of someone who is:

...capable of creating, or endowed with the ability to produce something new.

This meaning is close to action. A creative person is one who does something, for example skilfully moves a brush, and whose doing leaves a trace in the world, often a material, tangible, meaningful one. The definition is sound. But is it complete?

Imagine an artist standing in front of an empty canvas. Millions of things could appear there. Each would be created. Each would be new. Each would be the result of doing. Yet the artist does not create a million things. The artist chooses. From endless possibilities, from the whole spectrum of what could be, they choose this one. The reason is rarely that it is the easiest, and rarely that it is the most obvious. They choose it because, in their view, it makes sense. The choice is considered, shaped by values and, above all, intentional.

So it turns out that creativity is more than the ability to create. It lies in:

...the ability to give meaning to what we create: the intentionality that stands behind every choice.

And that is why creativity is more important than ever before

We have gained tools that support us in creating: they generate variants, suggest ideas, speed up processes. But it is still we who make the choice. It is still we who decide what makes sense, what we want to say, which way to go. AI tools are assistants, powerful, helpful, sometimes already irreplaceable, and we remain the authors of intention.

That intention reaches beyond works of art. It also concerns solving problems. Innovation is a creative act too: the choice of a different view, a different approach, a different path. And here tools can be our allies. How? For instance by inspiring us to step outside our own patterns of thinking, by simulating unexpected scenarios or by suggesting perspectives we would never have come up with ourselves.