The democratization of generative tools has collapsed the friction between idea and output, rendering creation itself a commodity. What remains uniquely human is no longer the ability to make something new, but the capacity to misperceive on purpose—to filter infinite possibility through the irreplaceable lens of consciousness and the senses which inform it.
The internet’s first wave laid a universal groundwork for instant connectivity, enabling unprecedented accumulation of human creativity, communication, and output—essentially creating a vast, searchable archive of everything ever made and said. Today’s advent of AI has allowed us to harness this collective memory and transform its byte-sized elements into new “generative” outputs. In this new paradigm, generation is considered synonymous with creation. Because AI can produce artifacts often indistinguishable from human outputs, the very notion of creativity as a uniquely human trait is being called into question through attempts at mechanizing this process. Amid considerable discourse about creativity’s future in the AI era, I wanted to understand the mechanics: how does AI attempt to mechanize creativity, and where does that mechanization fail?
So, alongside the entire performative male population of New York City, I picked up The Creative Act by Rick Rubin to try and reason with the creative process. According to Rubin, a celebrated record producer, he set out to write a book about how to make a great work of art but ultimately “revealed itself to be a book on how to be”. The book offers a framework that positions creativity as an act derived from one’s relationship with their environment which flows through three states:
Source: The infinite field of creative possibilities that exist beyond individual consciousness, the universal wellspring from which all creativity originates.
Filter: The artist’s unique perspective, experiences, taste, and sensibilities that determine which Source ideas are received and how they are interpreted. This is what makes each artist’s work distinctive.
Vessel: The artist as receiver and translator—the physical being who channels Source through their personal Filter to create tangible work.
Generative models attempt to mechanize the creative process. Each transformation applied to a training set aims to decompose the imaginative act into reproducible mechanisms—or at least those we think we understand. Through Rubin’s framework, I want to try to pinpoint the threats and benefits that AI poses to creativity and why our indescribable humanness is ultimately why we will prevail.
Source
Source is the amalgamation of everything – the great dataset of the universe which we are privy to accessing. A key distinction for Rubin is that Source is unlimited, it’s not a scarcity that gets depleted. Source is the training set that AI “learns” from – our collective memory from the democratized internet. This is absolutely everything that AI labs can scrape from the internet and the process is cyclical – every second, each day, the internet eats itself. AI labs have reached beyond boundaries into the safeguarded minds of subject matter experts - doctors, writers, painters, and others aimed at accessing the most highly regarded forms of knowledge and art created by mankind. As we progress, Source will grow increasingly contaminated with AI-generated outputs, aptly dubbed now by the internet as “slop“: low-quality, mass produced AI generated content. The attention economy and its profit-maximizing algorithm underpinnings are largely to blame for the influx of slop as creators and brands are incentivized to continually contribute more media seeking the attention of an audience. Rubin warns of the ability of this noise to cloud our ability to receive Source and suggests the practice of tuning ourselves to accept subtle signals free from this overcrowding.
Filter
Because Source is too inconceivably large for brains or a model to process all at once, a choice must be made about where to direct our limited attention. Rubin notes, “To navigate our way through this immense world of data, we learn early in life to focus on information that appears essential or of particular interest. And to tune out the rest”. Generative models mimic filtration through their architecture and parameters which enable selective attention mechanisms to act on a given training set. Convolutional neural networks (aka CNNs) are a great example of mechanistic filtration. Designed to process grid shaped data (usually photos), CNNs employ a network of smaller filters which detect and amplify specific features while ignoring irrelevant visual noise, until layers of complex features converge into a more refined contextual understanding of an image. Our Filter guides its attention towards the desires of our subconscious and the multitudes which we contain: memories, experiences, unexplainable disdain, forbidden attraction, and sensory experiences. Rubin aptly notes that “our senses often misperceive data.” However, this is actually our superpower. While an LLM can indeed hallucinate, human misperception is not a mistake. Our misperception is by design, a meticulously crafted reality which belongs only to the artist themself. This is taste, the translation of Source into the unique dialect spoken within our container.
Vessel
Vessel is the container of filtered Source, filled with the sum of intangible matter to materialize when the moment is right. The vessel of a generative model is its context window – the tailored environment set to receive a prompt drawing on the underlying neural networks to generate an output. Context windows are fluid, much like the artist as the Vessel. As Rubin remarks, “the person who makes something today isn’t the same person who returns to the world tomorrow,” and context windows are designed to contain and home in on points of momentary relevance through prompting and attached artifacts. Human Vessels are influenced by all five senses and their emotional counterparts. The right combination of environmental factors (our emotional states, relationships with others, sensory experiences, etc.) propel us into a flow state towards creating with the filtered data that befits the unique moment. Models are limited to inferring this context through training and instruction, which will aim to fabricate a version of these environmental factors but never be truly immersed in the abstract moment. There is not a combination of lingual or visual references that can mirror Vessel’s ability to connect with its environment. This connection harnesses energy to receive filtered Source and create according to Vessel’s multidimensional connection with its environment.
“Source makes available.The filter distills. The vessel receives. And often this happens beyond our control.”
The creative act occurs when we use momentary energy to manipulate our version of reality into a new form. Human creativity begins precisely where a model’s knowledge ends: in the ineffable, lived experience of being. We have the unique ability to harness creativity through the act of letting go, tapping into our subconscious selves and senses to create meaning. Rubin acknowledges that our ability to access and harness our subconscious is under attack from two forces: the amalgamation of noise that weakens our attention, and “our tendencies to label, classify, reduce, and limit”—which pushes us toward the mechanistic form of generation. Resisting these influences takes energy, as protecting our misperceptions requires constant vigilance against the pressure to flatten our reality into something more legible, scalable, and algorithmic. But when we intentionally tune in and allow Source to flow freely through us without imposing mechanistic processes or influences onto ourselves, creativity naturally occurs.
“Our thoughts, feelings, processes, and unconscious beliefs have an energy that is hidden in the work. This unseen, unmeasurable force gives each piece its magnetism”
As content multiplies toward infinity, the creative act transforms from making something new to making something ours—a shift we’ll recognize instinctively, even if we’re unable to explain why.
Me when I’m a vessel
this is Premium Source