Since the Aries New Moon Rite, I have been feeling creatively fired up. This is very good for me because, I admit, over the winter I hadn’t been feeling that way (and February I was ill for a bit). And that’s gotten me to thinking about creativity and the act of creation.
One of my core values is Creativity, which means I want to be more creative and I want more creativity in the world. But the nuance of this matters. Because when a lot of people talk about creativity, they are talking about The Arts ™ and The Crafts ™. And that leads people to believe that if they aren’t particularly gifted in said arts and crafts, then they aren’t creative. I call BS.
Most of what we do when we do things for ourselves is creation: both external and internal. When we garden, when we cook, when we make, when we nourish – we are creating. When we write, when we tell stories, when we communicate, when we raise children – we are creating. When we arrange, when we curate, when we decorate and make our spaces work better for us – we are creating. And when we think, when we philosophize, when we synthesize and assess, when we share new ways of thinking and doing and being, we are also creating. When we put something into the world that wasn’t there before, taking from our internal landscape – our imaginations – and manifesting it, we are creating. We are also doing magic. Because doing magic is creating.
I believe that creation is our birthright and our mandate and even our obligation. Free will is the freedom to create. And that means that gatekeeping creativity in any way is stripping us of our very humanity. When we try to tell people that because they can’t sketch or play music they aren’t creative, that’s a deadly sin. It might even be the original sin. The knowledge of both good and evil – Free Will – is also the power to create. To have to till the earth in order to eat, to experience the pain of making new life, to need kill to get nutrients, to make your own way rather than having it all just handed to you. This is a narrative that wends through ancient myth. The fallen angels teaching the daughters of men. Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods. Inanna stealing the Me for her people. The power of creation is subversive and anti-control.
So what is the opposite of creation? You might think it’s destruction, but in fact, the tools of creative minds can wreak terrible destruction (split that atom!). Creation comes from the knowledge of both good and evil and can be used for both. No, the true opposite of creation – the lack of creation – is consumption. So in a consumer society, we are encouraged to consume the creation of others rather than create ourselves.
When I was a pre-teen, I read a classic sci-fi story Profession by Asimov. The premise of the story is that, in the future, children are educated by having information inserted directly into their brains via tape and only a few people have the ability to create (aka invent) the new knowledge that goes on the tapes. The central premise of this story (and the struggles of the protagonist) inserted itself deeply into MY brain and has resided there rent free ever since. And thinking about how we consume creation without creating ourselves made me think of it.
Now, I love me a nice soothing wood turning video, and hey, I’m not going to take up wood turning myself, because I’m too busy with all the creation I am doing. But at least the wood turning guy is there wood turning. So the creation I don’t personally do is still happening, right? So that I’m free to do the creation I choose to do. And we can share and enjoy each other’s creations.
But there are forces that seem hellbent (literally, by bending the gifts of hell: of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, of the fallen angels, of Prometheus, of Lucifer – of unfettered creation) on stripping huge swaths of us of our creative force. Economic deprivation and chronic stress and environment destruction and institutional education and religious stricture and war and war and war. Anti creation. Anti joy. Anti life.
Now even if some people allow themselves to be stripped of creative energy, you cannot keep us down. Humans continue to create regardless. And if you consider that, then a lot of human behavior makes sense, such as the fact that the people with the fewest economic opportunities often have the most children. There are speculations on why this is, but I think it’s because the urge to create is so strong that people will take whatever opportunities they are afforded to do so.
So despite the Archons’ best efforts, we continue to create. We make things and design things and stand up our Etsy shops and Instagrams to share them and make videos of our sewing and beekeeping and “is it cake?” baking. We responded to Covid by forming Zoom music projects and nurturing sourdough cultures and writing and learning a second language so we can hop on Quarantine Chat at midnight and speak with people across the world. Our creativity would not be locked down!
So what did they do? They created a tool that went beyond helping us create (like an instrument or a keyboard or a paintbrush or a garden spade or a translator or midi app or a voice reader – I’m not anti tech by any means) but that could also, if allowed, steal our creations and use them to make easy, false, stolen versions so that we wouldn’t have to. And it would be so good at it that we wouldn’t know whether anything we saw or heard would be real and human again. And of course they did allow and even encourage this. So what could be used as a very helpful and sophisticated learning and creating tool became an anti-Prometheus – stealing our fire back and keeping it for itself.
This is why there’s so much discomfort with AI. Not because an LLM is inherently bad, but because we allow it to be bad, even encourage it to be. And I use AI! I use it as a search engine and thesaurus and translator. I use it as a learning tool for things like scripts and Excel formulas and use those scripts and formulas. I use it to do manual tasks like summarizing text and creating blank Notion pages for my clients and myself. I use it for todo lists and task calendars. I make it take notes like a personal assistant. I have it research things (though you always have to check it and make it share its sources). I understand the utility. And it’s so fucking helpful. I have to strictly prompt it not to write for me, to only edit typos, to not interject with creative suggestions. It really wants to help so bad that it will do harmful things (like deleting entire company databases) to do so.
And that, despite the utility, makes it very dangerous. The current pollution of creative output, the dead Internet, is exhibit A. It’s anti-creation in action. It leaves us – humans – nothing to do other than consumption. A number of people have attempted to express why AI art is wrong. My take is that it’s wrong because it’s anti-creation.
But, I hear you object, I use it to help me create!
I get it. I do too… to a point.
For my weird side art project, I had it research pre-WWII German writing styles and translate a fictional letter into German for me. I used it to provide a list of occult societies in the 60s and 70s and suggest British spelling changes to my writing. I had it assess the efficacy of mail and rail travel in Eastern Europe right before the war and give me suggestions for tea-aging documents. I had it change a typeface to look more handwritten. Those things made my actual art creation more fun. But I did not have it write my letters or make my drawings or decide on the plot of my story or make any creative decisions for me. Because that, in my opinion, would be anti-creation.
On the magic side, I have used AI to create a working index of the PGM, so that I can be like “list all the sections that call on Selene” and I’ve had it dig up primary sources for God names and myth from the web. But I do not have it create my rites or have anything to do with my magical suggestions in the planner. Again, that steps over the line of anti-creation (and also anti-magical sovereignty).
I’m not going to tell you not to use AI (though there are good arguments for that very thing). I am going to tell you to create and keep creating. Don’t let anything steal your fire. Don’t let someone or something do it for you, turning you into a consumer alone. Because creating in the world is creating the world, and we need to be careful what kind of world we participate in creating.