Stop asking if AI can be creative. Start asking who will teach It.
The internet is flooded with AI slop. And that's mainly because the right people aren't engaging with it.
Last week, I spoke at Permeke Library's 20th anniversary celebration. For two decades, its shelves and the people who tend them have taught Antwerp's many cultures how to read, debate, and dream.
Now we face a different kind of library—a silicon Babel that has absorbed nearly everything humanity has ever written, painted, or sung. Yet what are we doing with this unprecedented cultural repository? Drowning the internet in Ghibli-style profile pictures and LinkedIn content slop.
Beige averages that satisfy no one. This mediocrity isn't a bug—it's mathematics. A model trained on everything and optimized for everyone will naturally gravitate toward the statistical center, the cultural equivalent of white bread. Perfectly adequate and utterly forgettable.
Meanwhile, the very people most equipped to pull AI away from this median—writers, poets, philosophers, sociologists—stand on the sidelines, arms crossed. Yes, their work was scraped without permission.
Yes, disruption is painful. But here's what's actually happening: no one is buying AI-generated books, music, or films. Esohe's poetry still moves us.
Films like Sinners still pack theaters. Authentic human artistry isn't just surviving—it's thriving in the contrast.
AI isn't threatening art or culture. It's threatening the average. And when the middle gets automated, the edges become everything. The non-average becomes the north star.
The poets, critics, philosophers, and librarians aren't just safe—they're holding the only reliable compass for navigating this new territory. Years spent parsing subtext and exploring subcultures have prepared them better than anyone to navigate a model's latent space, where every concept exists as coordinates and every idea is just a vector-walk from another.
They understand something crucial: culture isn't content, it's navigation.
The machine can generate endlessly. What it lacks is a guide who understands why certain leaps matter and where they should land. So engage with the coordinates yourself.
Guide a sonnet through competing theological frameworks. Steer a policy draft through propaganda crosswinds. Send a medieval fool straight into TikTok irony and see what emerges.
The further you venture from the statistical center, the less the model echoes existing culture and the more it reveals unexplored pathways. Don't just start prompting. Become a semantic navigator. Show this alien intelligence where wonder actually lives.