Generative AI And Techno-Creativity: A Reflection On Post-Literary Creativity In A Technoutopian Age

Abstract

With the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), the last decade saw an unprecedented transformation in the world of creative engagements with GAI-assisted creative expressions in literary and non-literary writing. This paper attempts to analyse the impact of GAI on human creativity; the implications of the coming-of-age of technocratic and technified creativity, and what it spells for human beings in this increasingly posthuman world. The study attempts to understand the nature of creative expressions that GAI makes available in terms of the treatment of the theme, figurative language, meter, rhyme scheme, imagery, (stanzaic) structure and sound devices in poetry. The study hypothesises that while technological assistance through GAI reinforces the formalistic features of poetry and fiction, it does not allow for new breakthroughs in artistic and creative expressions, like producing new structures and styles of writing. This is because AI is imitative in its output as it functions as an aggregator, synthesising already available poetry on the World Wide Web to output conditioned narratives. This qualitative research will focus on poetry produced by GAIs like ChatGPT and CoPilot to examine the nature and structures of poetry and short story and will attempt to argue that human creativity supercedes AI’s creative responses in that the human mind is able to synthesise and process information to produce new forms and models, which AI is not yet capable to do. While GAI could be a good tool to reinforce age-old structures of poetry and fiction, it has yet to keep up with transformative postmodern human thinking, and it is still heavily dependent on sentiment and emotion. This study will help recognise the importance of the ‘esemplastic’ human imagination that can touch and transform all that it encounters in Samuel Colerdge’s words, which is dynamic feature of the hunman artistic brain and reiterate that while GAI is a productive tool, it is meant to assist human creativity and cannot take over that role for the human. The study, thus, posits the possibility of a peculiar ‘post-literary’ that is a product of technological creativity. While it could be productive to displace the centrality of the anthropocene in many instances, like that of environmental justice, in the case of creativity, humans are important agents in literary creativity in ways a machine is not.