Seeing Creativity Like a Language Model
Dan Shipper
AI won't just replace artists; it will change how we create by letting people direct and shape work rather than do every step. AI helps you find examples, explain what you like, and make more work in your own voice. Used as a partner and editor, AI can free creators from drudgery and expand who can do creative work.
25 Oct 2025
Collecting little moments like this is at the heart of creative work—even before AI. Writers have writers’ notebooks, artists have sketchbooks, and musicians often record snippets of melodies. These collections become the seeds of future work. If we approach creativity like a language model, we see that these collections are also the context for our future art. They’re the training data. Despite concerns about AI “flattening” art and culture, I think it has the potential to make our creative work even more unique, personal, and valuable, for three reasons:
- AI can help you find more of what you like—even if no one has collected something like it before.
- AI can help you articulate what you like.
- AI can help you to create more, quality work with your taste.
I threw a list of my favorite writers into ChatGPT and asked it to describe what was common about them.
For almost five years now, I’ve kept a note on my phone called my ineffable list. It’s a trick I learned from the writer Robin Sloan. Every time I come across something in the world that makes me pause—that has a little bit of that flavor of whatever it is that I like—I put it in my ineffable list.
People often fundamentally misunderstand AI as a creative tool: They assume it’s meant to do everything, replacing human creativity entirely. They’re afraid that the resulting work is soulless, inhuman.
But using AI well is like using any other tool well. You employ it for tasks that are best suited to its abilities. You act as an editor for everything it produces. And it becomes a creative partner, helping you to not only work faster but also to discover and bring forth a kind of work that wouldn’t have been possible without it. It also reveals things about creative work that were previously invisible.