This republished article first appeared in the Chicago Tribune

Generative AI is all the rage these days. We’re using it at work to guide our coding, writing, and researching. We’re conjuring AI videos and songs. We’re enhancing old family photos. We’re getting AI-powered therapy, advice, and even romance. It sure looks and sounds like AI can create, and the output is remarkable.

But what we recognize as creativity in AI is actually coming from a source we’re intimately familiar with: human imagination. Human training data, human programming, and human prompting all work together to allow our AI-powered devices to converse and share information with us. It’s an impressive way to interact with ourselves and our collective knowledge in the digital age. And while it certainly has a place today, it’s crucial we understand why AI cannot create and why we are uniquely designed among living things to satisfy a creative urge.

A century ago, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that human creativity springs from freedom — the capacity to bring forth what wasn’t there before. He considered creativeness the deepest mark of the human person, a spark that reflects the divine image in us. “The creative act is a free and independent force immanently inherent only in a person,” wrote Berdyaev in his 1917 book The Meaning of the Creative Act. He called creativity “an original act of personalities in the world” and held that only living beings have the capacity to tap into fathomless freedom to draw out creative power.

Ancient wisdom attests to this powerful creative spirit. One of humanity’s oldest stories begins with a creative task: naming the animals of the world. It’s a hint that we’re meant to do more than just survive. We have the power to imagine. Much later, the early Christian writer Paul, whose letters shaped much of Western moral thought, affirms this view when he describes people as a living masterpiece, made with intention, and capable of our own good works.

But without freedom, says Berdyaev, creativeness is impossible. Outside the inner world of freedom lies a world of necessity, where “nothing is created—everything is merely rearranged and passes from one state to another.” Here, materialism is the expression of obedience to necessity, where matter only changes states, meaning is relative, and adaptation to the given world takes the place of creative freedom.

AI belongs to this world of necessity. It is bound by the inputs we give it: code, training data, prompts. It has no imagination. It needs our imagination to function. And what does it give us in return? Based on vast training datasets and lots of trial-and-error practice, it analyzes what we ask it letter by letter, using conditional if-then protocols and the statistical power of prediction to serve up an amalgamation of data in a pattern we recognize and understand. AI is necessity by definition, wholly lacking in the freedom from which true creativity emerges.

So how do we break through this world of necessity and protect our birthright to create?

First, practice daily creativity. “Every creative act,” writes Berdyaev, “is creation out of nothing: the production of new forces rather than the changing or rearranging of the old.” And it doesn’t have to be a Picasso painting or a best-selling novel. Creativeness certainly includes the visual, literary, and performing arts, but it’s much more: a reorganized room in your house, a handwritten letter to a friend, an afternoon serving at the food bank. It’s a home-cooked meal for your family, a podcast episode, some words of encouragement to a struggling soul. Practice exercising your creative potential every day.

Second, limit your use of AI. That doesn’t mean ignore it completely – that would be hard to do now. It means be boss over it. The more we use it, the more we will want to use it. So before firing up ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok, ask a few questions: How will this infringe on my own creativity? Are there other ways I can get help with this? What is the mental and even spiritual cost to me of this AI session? Fight the urge to take the easy way out and practice depending on AI less.

Third, consider the source of your creativity. Berdyaev argued that creativity in the world is only possible because the world is created. In the last century, scientists have found bountiful evidence of complexity and engineering in living systems that seems highly unlikely to have emerged from a world of evolved necessity. Earth bears the hallmarks of creative action, and it’s also the field of activity we use to create.

So what will be here tomorrow that doesn’t exist today? That is entirely up to you.