What is it about?
This paper explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to create things like music, art, and stories—and how we make sense of this shift. It introduces three powerful cultural figures to explain our reactions to creative AI: The Trickster, who disrupts expectations, surprises us, and provokes both humor and anxiety. The Surveyor, who systematically explores creative spaces and reveals hidden patterns. The Harbinger, who signals the arrival of deeper, more transformative change in how we define creativity itself. By analyzing these three faces, the paper helps explain why AI-generated creativity feels so compelling—and so unsettling.
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Why is it important?
This paper offers a new cultural framework for understanding AI-based creativity at a moment when generative tools like ChatGPT, DALL·E, and others are reshaping creative industries. Rather than asking only what AI can produce, it looks at how people interpret and respond to AI creativity through familiar symbolic roles. The Trickster, Surveyor, and Harbinger capture the tension between novelty, structure, and future disruption—offering insights into how society might adapt to (or resist) this new creative paradigm.
Perspectives
This paper gave me the opportunity to explore a question that keeps coming up in our era of generative AI: What are we really seeing when machines make art? I’ve always been drawn to the stories we tell about technology—and the cultural figures we use to make sense of it. By framing AI as Trickster, Surveyor, and Harbinger, I wanted to offer a language for the feelings these systems evoke—not just their outputs. My hope is that this work invites deeper thought about creativity, meaning-making, and the unexpected ways AI is becoming part of our imaginative lives.
Dr. Robert Edgell
SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A monstrous matter: The three faces of artificial creativity, Journal of Creativity, April 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.yjoc.2024.100075.
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