Technology has expanded creativity for centuries. What makes AI different?

When Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern — two globally celebrated architects with utterly different sensibilities — die within days of each other, the juxtaposition invites a larger reflection.

Gehry twisted steel into improbable, swirling forms; Stern revived classical language with a precision that made his buildings feel timeless rather than nostalgic. Both relied heavily on digital tools to realize their visions. Technology expanded what they could draw, test and build, but it never erased the unmistakable fingerprints of their styles.

That is the truth artificial intelligence now forces us to confront: Even as we cling to a romantic myth that creativity is an unmediated human act, we quietly celebrate artists who embrace new tools — right up until the tools become unfamiliar. These debates shape the stories we see, how they’re made and who gets to make them.

Nowhere is that tension more visible than in Hollywood, where creative labor is both cultural identity and economic lifeblood. Yet some creators now pledge that their projects are “100% human-made,” as though artistic purity depends not on vision but on the mere absence of certain tools. AI becomes the latest stand-in for anxieties about erosion of originality, replacement of human imagination and the fear that mediocrity will proliferate.

But those anxieties rest on a misunderstanding of how creativity has always worked. Filmmakers, artists, musicians, designers and animators are surrounded by technologies that already shape creative work.

Consider artist David Hockney. His early “California cool” paintings were resolutely analog — fresh acrylics, bright surfaces, sharp lines. Yet throughout his career, he embraced every imaging technology that crossed his path: Polaroid collages, fax-machine drawings, iPad paintings, even multi-camera rigs that stitched simultaneous perspectives into one dazzling frame. The technology didn’t dilute his originality; it amplified it.

Cinema evolved the same way. Director Christopher Nolan is praised for his devotion to practical effects, yet his films still depend on advanced technology: IMAX cameras, computational modeling, engineered soundscapes and digital-analog hybrids that turn physics into spectacle. Ridley Scott has used cutting-edge effects — from “Alien” to “Blade Runner” to “Napoleon” — to construct cinematic worlds shaped by his distinctive sensibility. Even the classic era leaned on its own innovations: Alfred Hitchcock’s spirals in “Vertigo,” the courtyard of “Rear Window,” and the shower scene in “Psycho” were each feats of visual engineering as much as storytelling.

Nolan, Scott and Hitchcock — like nearly every major filmmaker — used the most advanced tools of their era to expand storytelling. The tools change, but their artistic fingerprints never do. Today’s debate forgets that filmmaking has always relied on proto-AI systems — digital color timing, or VFX pipelines that churn out thousands of variations for a human to choose from. The process was never “pure,” and audiences never cared.

Which brings us to a more contemporary anxiety. Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” recently promised fans that his current Apple TV hit “Pluribus” would contain no AI assistance. Such pledges reassure audiences, but they also reflect the enduring myth that creativity was ever tool-free.

Fears that AI could “generate” the next “Breaking Bad” echo the old Infinite Monkey Theorem: that, with enough time, a simian randomly punching keys on a typewriter might one day “produce” the complete works of Shakespeare. But this confuses combinatorial output with artistic vision. AI might remix Hamlet’s soliloquy into something like, “To be, or not to be: that is the question on which existence itself trembles,” but Shakespeare it is not.

Nor is it remotely Tom Stoppard, whose “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” didn’t imitate Shakespeare, it refracted him, transforming Hamlet’s margins into a philosophical tragicomedy from a wholly new vantage. That imaginative leap — the invention of a perspective no one had considered before — is precisely what machines cannot do. Originality isn’t clever rearrangement; it’s the vision that makes the familiar suddenly new.

A synthetic Gilligan episode may faintly resemble the thing it imitates, the way quartz can pass for diamond. But even cursory inspection reveals what’s missing: internal structure, tension, clarity, an integrity that emerges from human imagination, not statistical prediction. AI can generate the plausible, not the inevitable outcome.

And here is a quick answer to the fear that AI will flood the world with mediocrity. No one denies that AI can churn out a quick, cheap facsimile — and that some executives will happily take the savings. The real question is whether audiences will settle for the facsimile once the novelty wears off.

These fears are not new. They erupted with mass-market paperbacks, then again with home video, and again with streaming. While each expanded the supply of middling work, no one ever confused a pulp paperback with Joan Didion, or the hundredth forgettable slasher sequel with John Carpenter. Quality contrasts even more sharply against undistinguished, mass-produced output.

The anxiety, in other words, is not that AI will annihilate creativity. It is that AI exposes a truth we have long preferred to ignore: creativity has never been the immaculate myth we romanticize. It has always been a convergence of vision, tools, collaborators, constraints and accidents, shaped by an imagination that no machine, however sophisticated, can originate.

AI can accelerate production, lighten drudgery and democratize experimentation. It can turn days of rotoscoping or matte-painting revisions into hours, or generate dozens of costumes and set variations that human designers can build on. It helps artists iterate more freely, test ideas more rapidly and clear logistical barriers that once constrained entire mediums. But what AI cannot do is create a Gehry building, a Hockney painting, a Nolan film or a Gilligan story that isn’t, sooner or later, exposed as derivative.

The imitation always shows.

Brian J. Gross is a lawyer who worked in Washington, D.C., for 32 years and now lives in Austin, Texas.