Creativity: An Error in a Controlled Environment
An interview with Jenia Yanes about art, error, and the human role in the age of AI
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly present in creative fields, questions around authorship, creativity, and the future of artists have intensified.
Fears of replacement often overshadow deeper discussions about what creativity actually is and what role artists play within society.
In this conversation, Jenia Yanes reflects on creativity and the essential human capacity that defines art, offering a perspective that reframes AI not as a threat, but as a mirror that brings us back to the core of what it means to be an artist.
How can artists and curators deal with the fear surrounding AI and democratization in the art world?
First of all, I want to give you a very simple exercise that I would recommend to any artist. You can even do it with ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence tool. Ask it to create an artwork that has never been created before, and then see what it comes up with.
You will be left with no fear, because it’s impossible.
This is where we need to understand what the value and the role of an artist actually are. And this brings us back to the whole question of artificial intelligence. It’s very important to ask: what is creativity?
So how do you define creativity?
Our brain is physically incapable of creating something entirely new, just like artificial intelligence. What our brain does is combine concepts, visuals, and ideas that we have already encountered before. At a certain level, artificial intelligence may even become more capable of doing this than humans.
There are established creative generation exercises: association maps, putting on different hats, applying simple rules like “what if I combine these two parts?” or “what if I make this bigger?” These are real strategies used to generate creative ideas, and all of them are based on modifying something that already exists.
We cannot create from absolute scratch. Not artificial intelligence, and not humans.
But there is one crucial difference. As human beings, we are capable of making an error. Artificial intelligence is not.
Creativity is an error in a controlled environment. That is what creativity is. And only a biological, living brain can produce that kind of error.
– Jenia Yanes
What do you mean by “error,” and why is it so important to creativity?
An error can be positive or negative. The worst thing that can happen to a work of art is indifference.
An error is something that goes against logic, against what was expected to happen.
For example, you leave food on a kitchen counter, it produces fungus, and from that error, we get penicillin and antibiotics. Many scientific discoveries have happened exactly this way: by mistake.
This ability to make mistakes is something artificial intelligence does not have. And this is why, even though we are witnessing a completely new spiral in art with AI, humanity is being pushed back to the essence of what it means to be human.
So if creativity alone doesn’t define an artist, what does?
Creativity can exist in any field. You can be a creative financier, a creative mathematician, or a creative engineer. Creativity alone does not make someone an artist.
Art does not even have to be creative in order to be art. Creativity makes art more interesting, more unusual, and more engaging… but it is not a requirement!
For me, being an artist means having the capacity to transmit something. Art is a way of expressing an inner idea, feeling, state, transformation, or experience, so that others can receive it.
I like to think of it as a sound wave. The artist sends an impulse, and the audience receives it.
That impulse can be weak or strong. Some art is boring, some art is shocking, some is comforting, and some you wish you could unsee. But what makes a person an artist is the ability to translate an inner experience into a language that others can understand.
Many people perceive the world in unique and interesting ways, but not everyone can translate that perception into a readable language for others. That’s where craft comes in.
Your artistic language can be visual, physical, conceptual, or material. It can be painting, carpentry, or something else entirely. What matters is that you can communicate your inner message precisely enough for others to feel it.
Where does artificial intelligence fit into this process?
Artificial intelligence can analyze patterns. It can identify which forms or colors are often associated with certain emotions, or which structures tend to provoke specific reactions. But it does not learn this empirically. It does not feel. It learns from secondary information and how people describe their reactions.
AI cannot witness transformation through art. It can only read feedback about it. Because of that, its understanding is always secondary. It will always be more shallow than a human artist. Not because it is weak, but because it cannot feel.
Human artists can feel.
And that is the simplest and most important difference.
The topic of AI in the arts remains divisive and nuanced. This article is not an endorsement of AI’s use in creative fields, but an exploration of one perspective within a much larger debate. The views expressed are those of our interviewee, Jenia Yanes, whose approach represents just one of many ways artists and thinkers are engaging with this issue.
