AI is a collaborator not a creator.
Humans are creators. Beyond human experience I have no knowledge, but I’m working on that too. Art is a uniquely human sign of intelligence. Sure, language was a massive evolution for us to get up and out of the jungles and into skyscrapers and then rocket ships. Art is the human expression of an idea, feeling, mood, emotion, passion, fear, fire, and infinity… There is no end to what humans can create as conductors of the spiritual force that is creativity.
In Mathew Fox’s seminal work on Creation Spirituality, he’s given a God/Jesus Catholic priest-informed idea that creative performace is how humans pray. Before religion, before language, before verbal communication, humans used dance, rhythm, music, song, voice to speak praises to god.
Good news, creativity is prayer.
The spiritual network is god. Or a god, as I understand something incomprehensible by my ever-so-human mind. God is unfathomable. The church does not have a corner on pathways to god. When I was a kid, raised as a Presbyterian in Tarrytown, an old-money neighborhood in Austin, Texas, I thought communion was the extent of my church commitment to my mother. She was an elder of the church and very much into Jesus taking the wheel, especially after she lost driving privileges.
AI is a coduit. A tool. A program.
AI is not getting smarter, only faster. Humans using AI are getting smarter at a rate unknown in human history. The Era of Mass Intelligence has arrived.
The short version: salary and desirablity of workers used to be determined on intelligence and ability. Today intelligence is like porn: free. No one knew porn would end up being the engine that blue up video recording techology, the internet, web interface innovations, and massive revenue growth. Now it’s free. Oh well. That’s how quickly the world changes. Intelligence has just hit a similar fracture.
Intelligence is no longer the number one scarce resource on Earth.
Creativity is the human currency, not intelligence. Yes, they are combined. A uniquely intelligent person naturally gravitates to creative arts: music, drawing, journaling, photography. Even the scientific arts have creative elements. Imagine trying to create a unified theory of relativity withouth god or creativity. Einstein was a genius, yes, but he was a genius in both intelligence and creative drive.
Curiosity and tenacity is what propel great minds. As humans learn creativity and art, they also tune into empathy, the experience and ideas of others, and they begin listening. Artists listen with intent. The intent to record, remix, revise, and redirect. Life. Energy. Love. Space. Time.
CR8V is the label we’ve come up with for creativity in the modern, AI-enabled era.
Humans created AI. They should not fear AI or the computer takeover. It’s the billionaires who think they know best, who are building security fortresses underneath Hawaii like a Bond villain. They own yachts more powerful and expensive than an experimental reusable rocket? Their power, at the moment, is unchecked and damaging the planet. Damaging the human spirit, actually, but we can leave that for a later discussion.
AI is like desktop publishing was 30 years ago. Or Photoshop. Or the iPhone. Or the Internet. It’s an inflection. I call it The Fourth Inflection. I will unpack that shortly. AI is a disruptive technology that has the rich excited about becoming more-rich, the artists afraid of becoming more irrelevant. Both are misguided approaches to this new dawn.
- Learn AI
- Converse with various AI platforms, see what resonates with you
- Collaborate with AI
- See where your human heart and human mind and ultimately human spirit wants to go.
Artists are weaving a fabric of their own lives: past, future, present in all its mysterious forms.
We share this fabric with other humans. This begins the formation of a feedback loop. Initially just between an individual and a work of art. Ideas behind the art, the human expression, either vibes, resonates, or juices you up. Or it does not. That’s human art. You get a response. Positive. Negative. Neutral.
AI art is not art. It is generative slop. Performance might be a good word, but even that adds some personification that does not exist. AI has no understanding or comprehension of anything even relatively human. Nothing. No taste. No feeling. No sensation. No lived experience. No history. Only numbers, letters, and reswizzling.
(Reswizzle: my term for ai generative art or text. Derived from the swizzle stick popular in the 70s in Las Vegas casinos, often with the name of the casino, like “The Sands” etched into the plastic stick. It might be shaped like a sword, a mermaid, a beach umbrella.)
AI does not comprehend any of what is being Retrieved Augmented or Supplemented. (RAGS)
Generative is a fancy name for reswizzle. The pushback starting to happen against AI and the maniacal arms race of the billionaires is slop. That’s the technical term. SLOP. As in pig slop, slop at the bottom of an unlined trash dumpster at a local barbecue restaurant. As in bullshit.
But it’s not bullshit if you …
Damn, this part is not as easy to explain.
Most of AI today is being used for two things:
- billionaires dominate the tech for the future of mankind forever and ever amen
- mass human distraction – social media, memes, influencer videos, reels, tiktoks
Here is where you come in. If your human mind arrived here with you, perhaps you can see the hope in what we have in mind, what Julia Cameron had in mind when she gave us the blueprint for creative recovery.
That’s enough for this moment. Check out more pages of this site. Reach out directly if you have ideas, want to contribute creatively, financially, or as a dev. We’re all in.
AI is not the enemy. Use your human mind to unlock the next level of your mindfulness and gratitude by sharing your story. Your human story. The story no AI can even comprehend, even as they show signs of criticism and reflection in tools like NotebookLM. < A lie. A hallucination. A dream. Also, a GATEWAY.
We’re going to unlock your human mind using AI and the creative power of generative … something… not creativity… perhaps the word is design. AI creates designs. It is not art.
Art is Human.
Design, or Graphics, can be generative. Writing is human. Summarizing is reswizzling what has been written before. There is ZERO creativity.
All additive AI, generative, is reswizzling. The aim of AI, the way a human mind targets, runs, prompts, and revises AI’s output… That’s collaboration. The AI is not creative. Your human ideas are creative. How you learn to cajole AI into giving you the result you want to illustrate a new poem, that is, humans, using AI for creative good. The image is not creative; the human who used AI to create the image, to realize the dream in their human mind’s eye, is something NO AI TODAY or of the FUTURE can manage.
CR8V is the human creative spirit that binds us together. Artistsway.ai is designed to help you unlock, empower, and aim your magical human mind.
Welcome to the artist’s way remixed by one human and time.
John McElhenney – artist
Artistsway.ai < return to index
next up: community – how to find and support other artists
Watch this space. Our partners at iterativ.ai and isthisart.ai are hard at work getting our training and enablement system up and ready for beta testers. If you’d like to be among the first to try ArtistWay.AI please reach out to [email protected]. We will send invites as the system comes online in early 2026.
From the minds of
