Calling AI “not creative” because it has no consciousness confuses creativity with a séance. Creativity is making something new, useful, surprising, or emotionally resonant. AI does that constantly. It combines patterns, follows constraints, explores variations, and occasionally produces work people never would have imagined. The fact that it learned from human output does not disqualify the result; humans learned from humans, for Pete’s sake.

The real question is not whether AI can create. It obviously can. The question is who exercises taste: chooses the brief, rejects the mediocre output, recognizes the accident worth keeping, and accepts responsibility for the final work. AI is an absurdly fast junior collaborator with no shame, no fatigue, and no understanding of why any of it matters.

That shifts creativity rather than abolishing it. Prompting is direction. Steering is judgment. Selection is authorship. People who outsource all three and then call themselves visionaries are just pressing shuffle.

AI can be creative. The dangerous delusion is that anyone using it deserves the credit.