What does it mean to really make something?

Not generate it, but create it, with all the friction and uncertainty that entails.

This week, cognitive scientist and science writer, Sheetal Potdar, traces the evolutionary roots of creativity from monkey scams in India to walnut--cracking crows in Japan, and asks what we give up when we let AI do the hard part.

Let’s go.

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A few years ago, my friend pulled out his phone to take a selfie on the busy streets of Vrindavan, a religious town in India.

Just as he was about to click, a mysterious, furry hand snatched his phone away. He later recounted he was too shocked to react to such a bizarre scene – a monkey making away with his phone. 

The monkey was the first act of a rather elegant scam. In the second act, a shifty man appeared and asked for five hundred rupees (roughly five US dollars) in exchange for the phone. Too dumbfounded, my friend coughed up the money, and lo and behold, his phone was returned.

Long-tailed macaques in Bali’s Uluwatu temple also steal from tourists to barter for food. Whether trained or not, our primate cousins have figured out that humans tend to give rich rewards in exchange for certain objects. 

It is easy to appreciate the ingenuity of the man to team up with monkeys to make a living.

But what of the monkeys in Bali who have learned to game the system without prior training? Isn’t that creativity?

Sheetal is a freelance science journalist living in Mumbai, India. She has a PhD in neuroscience and has written about AI art, chronic pain and depression, cognitive fatigue, exercise, and more. She also occasionally writes science blogs on her website.

@Sheetal_Potdar | @sheetalpotdar.bsky.social | LinkedIn

Creativity is defined as the cognitive ability to generate ideas or solutions that are both novel and valuable. Importantly, the value of a creative product – be it a song, a story, a painting, or a mathematical proof – is determined by the observer and the context in which it appears.

Often, creativity manifests as an elegant solution to complex problems never encountered before.

This is best exemplified in an experiment performed by Wolfgang Köhler, a 20^th century psychologist. He placed bananas out of reach of chimpanzees but also provided them with wooden boxes.

After several futile attempts, some chimpanzees had an insight, or an ‘aha moment’, where they realized they could stack the boxes, climb on them, and reach the previously inaccessible fruit.

This ability to piece together different actions to reach a reward has been documented in corvids (ravens, rooks, and crows), and even, remarkably, in bumblebees, showing that the building blocks of insight, and indeed creative problem-solving are present even in invertebrates with tiny brains.

As impressive as creative problem-solving is, we associate creativity with transformative, paradigm-shifting, emotionally profound work produced by apparently gifted individuals.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Monet’s The Poplars – a series of four paintings of the Poplar woods in the four different seasons – and I was dumbstruck.

Having grown up in India, I had experienced seasons differently; seasons like autumn are non-existent, bone-chilling winters are unheard of in the tropical climes. Yet, something about the way the same scenery showed such drastic change, though the change itself was incremental and gradual, mesmerized me.

Such is the power of what some researchers call ‘big-C creativity’ – it can transcend space, time, and even lived experience.

This kind of creativity is admittedly hard to find and study in animals. Yet, some of the necessary building blocks may be present.

Consider the Bengalese finch: female finches respond to complex, novel male songs with measurable changes in heart rate – a physiological signal of recognition that something new and valuable has been heard. Once creativity is recognized, it must be transmitted.

I could appreciate Monet’s interpretation of the seasons I have never experienced because that knowledge (autumn, the slow creep of cold) had been transmitted to me through culture.

Humpback whales do something similar. Their songs have distinct phrases, and each year, individual whales add new phrases to their songs learned from other populations, to form musical trends that can spread across geographically separated groups.

Whether those trends are driven by a few influential individuals or spread more democratically is still unknown, but the phenomenon itself suggests that creative innovation can become embedded in animal culture, much as it does in ours.

A key difference between animal and human creativity is that animals are creative within the limits of their ecological constraints. Human innovation, on the other hand, has often transcended those limits into realms accessible only through technological advancement. 

One such advancement is Artificial Intelligence, which has pervaded almost every aspect of creative society, particularly in the last decade. Stories, music, images, art: generative AI has entered all of it, calling into question the meaning of creativity itself, and the ethics and ownership of what AI produces.

Many experts bemoan the loss of human creativity due to AI use, with one view that essential skills like writing and critical thinking are being lost without any awareness or a feeling of remorse.

Others argue that pervasive AI use reduces curiosity, a prerequisite of creativity. Research supports this: people who habitually resorted to AI for routine tasks scored lower on measures of creativity. 

However, the picture is more complicated.

In another study, short stories written by people who had access to AI-generated ideas as starting points were rated as more novel and useful overall by independent reviewers, but they showed significantly less variability in their themes. 

That loss of variability matters more than it might seem. Variation is the raw material of evolution, and without it, natural selection has nothing to act on. When AI collapses individual voices toward a collective average, we are not just making creativity more uniform, we may be stalling its evolution entirely.

Contrast this with creative problem-solving observed in crows.

In a Japanese city, crows drop walnuts onto roads with traffic to use passing cars as nutcrackers. In one population, the crows had gone a step ahead: using pedestrian crossings to throw nuts onto, so as to devour the broken nuts without being run over.

But a study in Davis, California found that crows dropped walnuts at the same rate irrespective of whether cars were passing or not. This indicates that the crows use the hard surfaces of paved roads to crack nuts rather than passing cars. Here, crows seem to have figured out that dropping nuts from a height on a hard surface can also crack them. 

Different populations, different solutions to the same problem.

This variation  is exactly what AI threatens to remove: the individual variation that allows creativity, like any trait, to keep evolving.

On the flip side, it can be argued that AI is the logical next step in the development of technology, to which we must now adapt.

Bowerbirds offer a useful counterargument. The species is particularly accomplished at building elaborate nesting structures using materials from their surroundings. Depending on where they live, bowerbirds choose different objects to decorate their bowers.

In urban environments, bowerbirds choose shiny and colorful objects from human garbage, while in rural areas, they choose natural materials like leaves. This suggests that bowerbirds have adapted their creative choices to changing environments.

Could AI similarly represent a new constraint which shapes, rather than diminishes human creativity?

We perform creative activities in multiple stages: free-flowing exploratory thinking, persisting despite obstacles, trialing different solutions, using emerging insight, and validating through analytical thinking.

Many of these steps involve uncertainty, which can be uncomfortable.

Yet the release from this discomfort through sustained effort produces a kind of satisfaction unmatched by simply copying pre-existing solutions. Using AI removes some of this friction, and with it, some of the pleasure.

Our greatest challenge in the AI age is to preserve our willingness to engage in exploratory, painstaking, and time-consuming processes of creation, especially in the face of instant gratification.

We must draw inspiration from the builders, dancers, singers, and tinkerers of the natural world.

Deep in the oceans off the coast of Indonesia, octopuses carry broken halves of coconut shells to use as a protective shield. Though they find it difficult to walk with the shell, they carry it around in case they need it for shelter in future.

AI is our coconut shell: a tool we carry for a future that hasn’t arrived yet, but slowing us down in the present. 

Try before you prompt. The next time you face a creative task, give yourself 15-20 minutes to think, write, sketch, or brainstorm before turning to AI. Tap into your lived experiences to find story angles and topics. The point is to give yourself an opportunity to come up with original ideas devoid of any external prompts.

Practice creativity. You don't need to write a novel or paint a masterpiece. Paint your walls instead. Hand-write in your journal every day to exercise your writing muscles. Try to fix something before replacing it. Pick up a new hobby and be comfortable with being bad at it.

Get outside and pay attention. Spend time in nature without immediately reaching for your devices, like phones and cameras. Notice how animals, birds, plants, and insects respond to their surroundings. Creativity often begins with curiosity and observing small details.

Support human creators. Attend shows by local artists. Subscribe to an independent publication. Support your favorite authors by sharing their books. If you value human creativity, show up for the people who spend their lives practicing it.

Ask for transparency. When you encounter AI-generated content, ask how it was made. When you use AI to create content, disclose it to set an example of open use. Support organizations like DAIR and The AI Resist List that advocate for clear disclosure of AI-generated work, fair compensation for creators, ethical data use, and responsible development of AI systems for community causes rather than corporate gains.

Improve AI literacy and ethics. Learn about AI ethics, support projects that use AI ethically for solving global problems, promote ethical data use, and call your elected representatives to push for AI regulation by states.

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