Jazz Twemlow.
Jazz Twemlow, Senior Creative, Paper Moose
In his highly influential book, The Master and His Emissary, Dr Ian McGilchrist warns against a society seemingly led by the brain's left hemisphere. A world built on replicative thinking - dominated by data, analysis, and the manipulation of what is already known - risks losing its right-brained knack for rich experience, deeper meaning, and imagination. Nearly 15 years after its publication, emerging into an era of AI-led upheaval, McGilchrist's message has never felt more urgent.
If we're already in a left-brained, analytical, less imaginative world, AI seems likely to make matters worse. Trained on the already-known, AI's creativity - as far as I can tell so far, having worked with it now for a year - relies largely on rehashing what it's been trained on. It doesn't suffer from flashes of inspiration in the shower, nor does it have, according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, "geist", that sense of creative spirit, or soul: that right-brained capacity for lateral leaps of wild thinking that escapes the known.
This means, as we come to lean on AI more in creative fields, areas that were traditionally the province of right-brainery will slowly become the stomping grounds of data trained on data: remixes of what's come before. If we too heavily outsource our creative thinking to things that apparently think, the creative process will circle in on itself as creative output comes to rely on a machine that's all left-brain rehashing a left-brained world.
But it's not just the process or the output that may become more left-brained, but we as (creative) people too: our tools come to shape us. More divergent ("creative") thinking is often a right-brained activity. However, with AI and AI-prompting, much of our creative thinking is shifting over to the left, because language is a left-brain dominant activity. As the creative process becomes more a language-based activity - trying to think of the correct prompt to then get the AI to do the creating and problem-solving - it's possible we will inadvertently build up the muscle of the left hemisphere for creative tasks.
The ramifications of this may be a compounding lefterism for tasks that were traditionally more right-brained. If our brains come to associate creative tasks with language (prompting), rather than divergent thinking, a habit may be formed, and as McGilchrist observes, "On those occasions where the 'wrong' hemisphere does get in first… it will most probably continue to trump the other hemisphere, even if the other hemisphere would have been a better choice at the outset." My, (perhaps paranoid) extrapolation from this is that if the creative process becomes more of a semantic exercise, then in situations where we need to be creative without AI, we may find our right hemisphere showing up less frequently and with less force in favour of our newly-promoted left hemisphere, a pattern consistent with well-known neuroplastic changes from repeated cognitive habits (Draganski et al, 2004).
The overall picture seems, to me, to be two processes funneling us into even further left-hemispherism: AI using the already-known in attempts to craft something original; and our own leftward shift in how we approach creative thinking when collaborating with AI.
But so what? If the creative process becomes more a question of linguistically conducting rather than playing a divergent instrument yourself, is that so bad? Maybe not. But I'm of the opinion that what we're naturally inclined and designed to do is worth protecting, if only to delay unseen consequences while we properly figure things out. Office work and TV seem harmless enough on the face of it, but we're now realising the consequence of increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Social media and smartphones, released without so much as a "Should we?" check-in before global dominance set in, have undoubtedly done harms to our attention spans and (especially teen) mental health we're still scrambling to fully comprehend a decade too late.
Knowing what we know now about smartphones, if we could reset and release them all over again, would we do things differently, individually and societally? Of course we would. Now with that mindset, think about our rapid embrace of AI: is there anything we can foresee that we can start protecting against now before it's too late? I would say, for one, we can send our right hemispheres to the gym.
The economic allure of AI is too hard to resist, and so the embedding of AI into nearly every creative process is inevitable. I see a lot of positives, of course. But to avoid a descent into a tsunami of "AI slop" - formulaic, low quality and unremarkable - we must meet this paradigm shift head on. To keep our right hemispheres active as we enter a more AI-powered creative era, it is vital to intentionally practise activities that foster embodied, analogue, and open-ended curiosity and tinkering. Regular sessions of playful, aimless exploration - like free-writing, sketching without a brief, or improvising with materials - invite ambiguity, which is central to divergent thinking and right-hemisphere engagement (Kounios & Beeman, 2014).
Faced with AI's efficiency and its tendency to channel us into language-based, analytical ruts, it is also crucial to alternate digital work with entirely human, analogue creative sessions. Before prompting an AI, try first to brainstorm or experiment by hand, and protect time for deep, undistracted attention - be that in nature, art, or simple observation - so that context and meaning can emerge beyond the confines of rapid optimisation (McGilchrist, 2009; Draganski et al., 2004). If in doubt, just remember "analogue before algorithm" to avoid developing a co-dependency that sees us increasingly shunted into a left-brained way of being and creating.
At least, if we're aware, we can build habits that foster and maintain the neural pathways associated with imagination, depth, and holistic understanding, ensuring creative work stays both adaptive and distinctly human. This will help us stay creatively "fit", meaning that AI's role is just as a faster pathway to bringing great ideas to life, rather than something more parasitic that sees wild imagination wither into left-brained prompts that yield analytic rehashes of old, well-trodden ground.
References
Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G., Bogdahn, U., & May, A. (2004). Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427(6972), 311-312. https://doi.org/10.1038/427311a
Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2014). The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 71-93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154
Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2006). Artistic scientists and scientific artists: The link between polymathy and creativity. In L. V. Shavinina (Ed.), International Handbook on Innovation (pp. 267-278). Elsevier.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.