Generation is not creation

I have known, in myself and in others, a kind of intensity that amounts to a joyless imitation of passion. It often happens in areas of our lives where we are expected to produce something for a higher telos that transcends the daily grind of production and its banalities. We become caught up in something like love for the idea of a spouse without giving oneself over to that person: love of the idea of what we are doing at work, without loving the work itself.

As a musician who truly loves the craft (no matter how many hours, days, or weeks it demands in the studio) I can spot the difference between authenticity and artifice when it comes to that suffering passion. Passion is defined variably but I’m not speaking of passion in any technical sense. I mean what we usually mean by it: an intense, driving, inner movement to sacrifice for love of someone or something.

We can be intensely devoted to something we do not actually love; I see this when we guard it, regulate it, moralize it, and spend ourselves on it without ever delighting in the thing itself. In those moments, I don’t believe we have what I’ve been calling passion at all; there’s nothing of that intense, driving, love. Instead, we mistake protectiveness or mere self-expenditure for passion—defending something we strongly believe to be good and worth preserving.

But passion is not mere production of art, work, success, etc. — nor is it the mere defense or preservation of what one produces. Passion is bound up with creation, and creation begins in inspiration, almost ex nihilo—at least in the sense that we don’t know where something comes from and in the sense that we are imitating God, reflecting his creativity, in our own. Passion and creation are tied together in a deep impetus that arrives with a kind of mystery. We can neither account for its origin, nor will we ever fully master the ends toward which it reaches, which is why real creation seems always to strain toward something beyond mere utility, and, I’d argue, beyond us. Creative passion begins with desire and ends in the satisfaction of that desire.

Only living creatures are capable of this, and, to the extent that someone is not involved in that process, he acts from a kind of deadness of spirit, no matter how intense he may appear. That same deadness shows itself in the way people receive what others create. For example, when a work of art is finished, all one can do is witness the final stage of a creative process. To actually love that artwork with any passion is, at least in part, to imagine oneself into what the artist imagined along the way. It is to enter, however imperfectly, into the passion by which the thing came to be.

The same confusion where we receive in a deadness of spirit appears in our obsession with news and novelty—what I’ve elsewhere called the disordered desire to Monitor the Situation. We imagine that what is newest is also somehow most real and therefore most worthy of our attention. Yet the hidden aim beneath seeking what is real is to know the real world that does not change. That’s why it’s often better, and more important for growth and happiness, to listen to slightly older music—music that has stood the test of time and remained relevant as the truly passionate, creative, work of those who show they knew the world—than to scroll endlessly through what is new and perhaps only deals with shadows.

In a word: Generation is not creation, and life is not simply a matter of its own preservation. There are deeper things worth seeking, and which we would seek if we weren’t so easily distracted by the ripples at the surface.

Let’s talk about AI.

I am less and less threatened by AI than I once was, because what it cannot do includes the things I value most: relationships with God, family, friends, and, vocationally, with students; inspiration to create; speech and writing born of experience; and creative work that is not a generic ‘story about x’ but a particular tale I am moved to tell, whether fantastical or rooted in true historical events. I value creation more than generation.

Granted, if I tune an AI drafting tool like Claude or ChatGPT, it can be remarkable at drafting within the parameters I set. If I say, “Write me a history of the First World War within these parameters,” it can do passable yet shallow research while also shaping the findings into competent sentences and paragraphs and fitting them to my expectations for worldview, sourcing, and emphasis. There is nothing inspired about those sentences, but they get the point across, much as they would if, instead of hand-stitching a plain white T-shirt, I simply imagined the kind I wanted and bought it at Walmart. It’s the shirt I described and pictured according to certain qualities. Not less, not more. It’s not bespoke, and it’s not inspired, but it gets the job done.

One point is missing from much of the current debate over how to consider the differences between what is human and what is AI: we do not fully anticipate the qualities of what we create. AI can generate x, y, or z on demand—and that’s honestly a perfectly reasonable task and purpose; not everything we do has to be done as true artists. Anything useful that helps with execution may serve a purpose, but it remains secondary. Some tasks are genuinely bounded by utility and it’s perfectly fine, for example, to use AI to do the work of generating text—so long as it’s not passed off as one’s creation. Generation and striving for pure utility belong to the satisfaction of a defined need—and there’s nothing dishonorable in that.

But in real making, the creator is surprised along the way. He is led by what emerges; he discovers, responds, and is changed by the process of making. What remains on the other side of the AI rise and eventual fall will be found where it’s always been discoverable: in love, worship, friendship, teaching, imagination, and the making of things that arise from reflective experience and return us to what is real and lasting, and therefore true.