In 2022, an AI-generated image won first place at the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition. Jason Allen had used Midjourney — an AI image generator — to create a piece called Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, refining it over hundreds of iterations before printing it on canvas and submitting it. The judges didn't know the image was AI-generated. When the truth came out, the reaction was swift and split down the middle. Half the internet said it was cheating. The other half said it was the future.
What almost nobody said was: what do we actually mean by "create"?
The argument we keep having
The AI art debate has settled into two familiar camps. On one side: AI isn't creative. It's remixing. It scrapes existing human work, recombines it, and produces something that looks new but isn't. There's no intent, no feeling, no lived experience behind the output. It's a sophisticated photocopier.
On the other side: human creativity isn't that different. We also absorb what came before us — every painting we've seen, every song we've heard, every conversation we've had. We recombine. We remix. The difference between a human collage and a machine collage is sentiment, not structure. And if the output moves someone, does it matter what made it?
Both sides are making reasonable arguments. Both are also missing the same thing. They're debating whether the machine can do what the artist does — without asking what the artist actually does.
What artists say
This is the strange part. If you listen to artists describe the creative moment — not the planning, not the editing, not the marketing, but the moment something actually arrives — the language is remarkably consistent across centuries, cultures, and disciplines.
Mozart didn't describe composing as building. He described it as hearing. The music was already there. He was taking dictation.
Michelangelo said the sculpture was already inside the marble. He was removing what didn't belong.
The jazz musician doesn't decide the next note. The note decides itself. The player's job is to not get in the way.
Writers describe characters "taking over." Painters describe the brush moving on its own. Poets talk about poems that "wanted to be written." The language is passive, receptive, almost eerie. As if something is coming through, and the artist's main contribution is being available for it.
You could dismiss all of this as romantic self-mythology. Artists are known for that. But the consistency is hard to ignore. Across traditions that had no contact with each other, the report is the same: the best work happens when the maker gets out of the way.
The uninvited guest
The contemplative traditions have a word for this. Several words, actually.
In Zen, the state is called mushin — no-mind. The calligrapher's brush moves without hesitation because there's nobody deliberating. The archer releases the arrow without deciding to release it. The act is complete before the self catches up to claim it.
In Vedanta, the teaching is more direct: you are not the doer. Action happens. Thought happens. Creation happens. But the one who claims authorship — "I made this" — arrives after the fact, like a man who walks into a room after a meal has been cooked and says "I was hungry."
Osho described creativity not as something a person does, but as something that flows through a person who has stopped obstructing. Thinking, planning, intending — these are the obstructions. When they quiet down, what emerges is creativity. Not your creativity. Just creativity.
This isn't mysticism. Or rather, it's mysticism that turns out to match what neuroscience has been finding. Studies of flow states — the condition where people report their best, most effortless work — consistently show decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking. The "I" goes quiet. The work gets better.
The creative moment, it turns out, is what happens when the creator isn't fully there.
So what is the machine doing?
Now bring the AI back into the room. The standard objection is: the machine has no self, no experience, no intent. Therefore it cannot create. But if the strongest human creativity happens precisely when the self is absent — when intent dissolves and something moves through the artist unobstructed — then the absence of self in a machine isn't obviously a disqualification. It might be the wrong criterion entirely.
This doesn't mean the machine is creative the way a human in flow is creative. The two absences are not the same. A human in mushin has dissolved a self that was once present. The machine never had one. There's a difference between a window that has been opened and a hole in a wall. Both let air through. They're not the same thing.
But the standard debate misses this distinction completely. It keeps asking: does the machine have what the human has? When the more interesting question is: does the human have what the human thinks it has?
The author who wasn't there
Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967. His argument was literary, not spiritual — he was saying that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer's biography or intentions. But the contemplative traditions arrived at something far more radical. Not just that the author doesn't matter. That the author might not exist.
If you sit with a creative act — really sit with it, honestly — and try to locate the one who created, you find the same thing you find when you look for the one who is conscious (essay one) or the one trying to become aware (essay two): nobody home. There are conditions. There's training, exposure, absorption, a readiness. And then something happens. The song writes itself. The solution appears. The sentence lands.
Who did it? The honest answer, if you watch closely enough, is: unclear.
This is unsettling for anyone who makes a living from creativity. Your name is on the painting. Your signature is on the book. The entire economy of creative work depends on attribution — this person made this thing. And yet the people most intimate with the process keep saying, in different ways, that the making happened somewhere their name couldn't reach.
The question the debate won't ask
The AI art debate will keep going. Courts will decide copyright cases. Galleries will set policies. Artists will protest and adapt. The technology will get better. None of this is going away.
But underneath the legal and economic arguments, there's a question that neither side wants to touch: if the best human creativity was never fully "human" in the way we mean — never fully authored, never fully intended, never fully owned — then what are we protecting when we protect it from machines?
Not the act of creation. That was always partly a mystery.
Not the self of the creator. That was always partly absent.
Maybe what we're protecting is the story — the comforting narrative that someone is in charge. That the artist is a special kind of self who channels something the rest of us can't. That there's a "who" behind every "what."
And maybe the machine, by creating without a who, doesn't threaten creativity at all. It threatens the story we tell about it.
The real question isn't whether AI can create. It's whether anyone ever did — and what remains when we stop needing to believe they did.
Sources and further reading:
- Jason Allen's AI-generated artwork wins Colorado State Fair — Smithsonian Magazine, September 2022
- Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" — 1967
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" — on flow states and the quieting of the self
- Osho, "Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within" — OshoWorld.com
- Eugen Herrigel, "Zen in the Art of Archery" — on mushin and action without a doer
- Arne Dietrich, "Neurocognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Experience of Flow" — on prefrontal cortex deactivation during creative flow