Nov 188 min read

Individuation Interrupted: AI, Creativity, and the Quest for Meaning

An image of a Shakespeare play but the audience is more interested in their phones. — Image created by AI.

Creative types never used to worry about machine automation – at least not when it came to their jobs. After all, automation was limited to repetitive and mechanical work, right? Machines weren’t going to be replacing writers, poets, and painters anytime soon - or were they? Research out this very week revealed that poetry written by AI in the style of Shakespeare was indistinguishable to non-expert readers than that written by the Bard himself will have creatives shivering down to their alliterative arses. To add insult to injury, the readers in the study preferred the poetry written by a robot, stating that it was more accessible and relatable than the actual Shakespeare.

It's funny isn’t’ it that AI innovations should continue to surprise us at such quickening intervals. The whole point of AI is to do simulate human processing so well that it can do things previously only we could: and voila, suddenly here we are. After all, what’s more human than the creative act? But wait, can we really say that the art that AI is generating is truly creative? If so, if not, what does that mean for us mere humans, for whom creativity may be more important than we realise (and that's true for creatives and non-creatives alike).

AI has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating art, music, literature, and even complex problem-solving. Tools like DALL-E, MidJourney, and DeepArt can create stunning visual art from simple text prompts, while AI-driven platforms can compose music and write poetry. These advances raise intriguing questions about the nature of creativity itself and what role AI may have in augmenting or inhibiting human potential.

“human agency in the creative process is never going away”

These words by Anne Ploine, one of the authors of the AI and the Arts report from the Oxford Internet Institute may be reassuring, but there’s evidence all over the place suggesting otherwise – at least when it comes to producing creative “outputs” like classic (sounding) sonnets. We’ll get into the difference between creative output and creative process below, but mark my words, AI is already starting to do an lot of stuff we thought only humans could do - and this is consequential not just for what ends up in our libraries and galleries, but for human psychological development itself.

Creativity Isn’t Just About Pretty Outputs, It’s About Self-Realisation and Social Transformation

From a Jungian perspective, creativity is not merely a snazzy skill some of us might have: it’s a crucial component of the human psyche that gives human life meaning. When we put our minds to a creative task, we access our deeper motivations alongside constellations of thought, memory, experience, and emotion that reside within the unconscious. Pursuing creative acts keeps communications open between our conscious and unconscious minds and serves to help us grow more deeply into the unique individuals that we are; this contributes to the progression of society as well.

A fantasy image of art instilling sense of self realisation. — AI Generated Image

Beyond just ourselves creativity serves as a direct (though more often frustratingly indirect) path to the collective unconscious, a place where we may encounter symbols and archetypes that resonate with universal human experience – across ages and cultures. With AI’s capacity to process vast amounts of data and generate novel outputs all by itself, what role might it have in the human creative journey?

Jungian Theory and the Individuation Process

For Jung, the personal development journey toward self-realisation is referred to individuation. The main task here is to grow the Self through the integration of the variety of elements that lie hidden in the unconscious. In this model the ego, or the “I” is just one small part of the Self; a part of conscious life and personal identity that sits within a much wider matrix of phenomena (memories, complexes, instincts, drives, motivations, patterns of behaviour, etc.) that is encompassed by the Self.

Inclusive of ego, persona, archetypes, and the personal and collective unconscious. — Jung's Model of the Self

Jung suggests that we can transcend the limits of our ego (including old narratives about who we are) and our complexes (patterned ways of being based on past experience) to become a freer, more liberated, and more authentic version of ourselves. Creativity plays a crucial role in individuation because it enables us to seek within ourselves new ways express unconscious material that can free it from the unconscious and make it available for more conscious integration into the Self.

Whether AI will be a facilitator or inhibitor of individuation is something we will soon find out – I expect like most things it will be both depending on how we engage with it. On the positive side, AI has capacity to draw on massive archives of information about our collective past across generations and cultures that may generate images, stories, and music that tap into the archetypal collective, AI can help individuals without a particularly honed skill in the creative arts to explore and understand their inner worlds ay operate - for example, by illustrating or making a video of a dream.

On the negative side AI may offer us a way to opt out of the hard graft of creativity too easily. As I’ve written elsewhere, we need a certain degree of hard graft and challenge to learn and grow. If we choose the lazy option (as we humans so often do) we may be crippling our own potential by choosing ease and stagnation over challenge and personal growth.

I know it’s a cliché, but often there really is no gain without pain.

Furthermore, while AI can produce novel ideas that can help us break out of our perpetually biased minds and free us to open up to new ideas that we previously wouldn’t have considered, it also risks reducing the variety of ideas that we encounter as a whole. After all, AI only looks back, it can make some pretty surprising integrations and juxtapositions, but innovation and true novelty come from looking forward, not being stuck on the past.

Two Kinds of Creativity: Compensation and Individuation

For Jung, creative works like fiction can serve compensatory or individuative function. The compensatory function works by bringing to light aspects of the psyche that may be neglected or repressed. In this it is trying to balance out the psyche by integrating opposites – for example – a very calm and peaceful person having violent dreams.

Another less helpful compensation function (which may look more familiar to many of us) involves the passive consumption of material that tends to remove us from life rather than taking us further into it. We may compensate for feeling unhappy or unfulfilled by turning ourselves into zombies in front of Netflix for hours. We may watch romance films to compensate for feeling lonely or violent films instead of feeling angry. While this kind of compensation isn’t terrible in itself, it’s best not to make a habit out of it.

The individuating function is a more conscious approach whereby makes space for exploring and integrating unconscious material. This can be done through the process of amplification whereby one is encouraged to amplify a dream or creative narrative (or even a feeling, projection, or thought) to see where it leads you. Creativity with an individuating purpose is used as a way to explore the self – for example – to paint or write yourself into a fantasy while not knowing where it’s taking you.

AI-generated fiction and art can fulfil both functions both for good and for evil (psychologically anyway). By creating content that reflects diverse perspectives and experiences, it may help individuals see beyond their conscious biases and assumptions leading to a deeper understanding of oneself and others, fostering empathy and personal growth.

“AI models can extrapolate in unexpected ways, draw attention to an entirely unrecognised factor in a certain style of painting [but] they aren’t going to create new artistic movements on their own.” - Anne Ploine

At the same time it can throw up standard and cliché patterns that fail to move us, in fact doubling down on old dynamics, which would in effect shrink rather than expand the realms of the Self, sucking the wind out of the individuation process. This works in the creation as art as much as the consumption of it. One of the reasons why the participants in the study mentioned at the top of this post preferred the AI creations is that they felt they were more digestible.

But is digestibility what we're really looking for? Isn't there satisfaction to be gained in the effort it takes to understand a difficult sonnet part of the idea? It may be difficult to get your head around James Joyce - but is settling for an AI produced more consumable narrative really the key to personal growth? Granted, it may not be James Joyce either, but you get the point.

Ethical and Psychological Implications: More of What We Want and Less of What We Need

Ever since I started researching the psychology of tech about fifteen years ago I have returned to the maxim:

"Tech may give us what we want at the expense of what we need."

Because all of our tech seems to excel in lowering the bar to just about anything (access to entertainment, goods, food, drugs, pornography, AI assistance, etc.) we quite often choose the easy option when the hard one will be more beneficial for us. When it comes to creativity, AI may be on the verge of producing an outcome that’s pretty damned good, but is it creative or just a performance of creativity? The performance may be good enough if I’m looking to create a silly illustration for a blog . . .

But can AI-generated content truly be considered “creative” if it lacks the emotional depth and personal touch of human-created works? Is it creative if it doesn’t draw on the hard work somebody embarked on to dig down into their unconscious, or even deeper, into the collective? And what about the truly creative minds that fed the Ais in the first place? What happens to the spirit of Van Gogh when I ask for AI to produce something in his style?

And last, but certainly not least, what of the essential biases wired into AI’s source data? One of the great outcomes of artistic endeavour is to upend our rigid confirmation-biased minds with something mind-blowingly new. Abstract impressionism, Modernism, Impressionism, Surealism – they all arose from patterns that were growing tired to express something new – AI (at least not yet) isn’t going to give us the next one when it’s head is always focussed on what came before.

AI, Creativity, and the Quest for Meaning

There’s no going back. When given a measure of creativity called the “Alternative Uses Task (AUT)” ChatGPT3 performed average to other humans. ChatGPT4 now ranks among the top percentile according to human judges. Considering that the current AI we’re using is in fact the worst AI we’ll encounter between the present and the future, the next iteration is sure to beat us all. So while AI may replace a lot of our artistic outputs, it won’t replace our requirement to engage in creative processes in order to individuate. So it is we ourselves who will have to take responsibility for that.

The intersection of AI, creativity, and individuation offers a rich field for further exploration in depth psychology. As we continue to integrate AI into our creative processes, we must remain vigilant of the ethical, psychological, and social implications.

I invite you to join me this Wednesday where I’ll be exploring these ideas with Psychreative, reflecting on how AI can shape our creative futures, and to consider the profound ways in which technology can intersect with the depths of the human psyche.