Creative Writing

Remember the phrase, “creative writing”?  Did it annoy you?  It did me.  Now that we’re getting more familiar with ai, I think I know why.  And I’m even more annoyed.

It goes beyond writing, of course: people are “creative” when they’re acting themselves out, making, shaping. Whether they’re making a map, a business plan, or a painting, shaping materials, sound waves, or landscapes, it’s creative if the movement they make to do it — yes, there’s always a movement, even for a whisper —  has not been formulated in advance, not made in someone else’s interests. But to stay with writing for now, only writers themselves actually know whether what they’ve done is creative or not.

So those words, “creative writing,” (aren’t they a bit archaic now?) licensed a kind of smug agreement that “we” could tell the difference.  We built a boundary into the language between “useful,” “trustworthy” writing and the rest — maybe “inventive” or “speculative”. Now, however, any actual writing we do will be creative, because all the “trustworthy, “useful” stuff will be automated. And to add insult to injury, if we publish it, ai will presume to judge it’s creativity — which is coming to mean its humanity.