OPINION with Tania Bond: Is creativity under attack in the age of artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence can generate images, sentences and solutions at extraordinary speed. Yet creativity begins before the answer — in the moment when someone notices that a question is worth asking. Before an artist makes the first mark on a canvas, something less visible has already happened. Attention has settled somewhere. Perhaps it is a particular shape, a memory, an uncomfortable silence or a connection between two things that previously appeared unrelated. Long before the hand begins to work, the mind has selected something from the enormous amount of information surrounding us and decided, consciously or not. This matters. That decision may be one of the most human parts of creativity. Much of the current discussion about artificial intelligence measures creativity through results. Can a machine produce a convincing image? Can it write a poem, compose music, design a building or suggest an unexpected solution? Increasingly, the answer is yes. AI can recognise patterns, combine distant references and generate possibilities at a speed no person could match. It can also produce results that surprise the person using it. Dismissing these abilities simply because they come from a machine would prevent us from understanding how profoundly our working lives are changing. But creativity does not begin with the production of an answer. It begins with attention. Two people can walk through the same street and experience entirely different places. One notices the architecture. Another hears a fragment of conversation. Someone else sees a plant growing through a crack in the pavement and thinks about persistence. What we notice is shaped by memory, culture, knowledge, fear, loss, hope and the physical experience of moving through the world. Information may be shared. Attention is personal. This is not relevant only to artists. A nurse may notice that a patient's confident words do not match the hesitation in their body. A teacher may recognise that a quiet child is not disengaged but overwhelmed. A mechanic may hear a change in an engine before any instrument records a fault. A business owner may sense the unspoken concern behind a perfectly reasonable question. In each case, knowledge matters. Experience matters. But something else is also taking place: a person is interpreting context, recognising significance and deciding that one detail deserves closer attention. As access to information becomes easier, professional value may increasingly lie not only in what we know, but in what we can notice, question, connect and transform. This does not mean that knowledge is becoming unimportant. Imagination without understanding can be shallow, and intuition without experience can be dangerously misleading. Human creativity is strongest when knowledge, practical experience, judgement and imagination work together. AI can participate in that process. I use digital technology myself, including AI-based tools. They can help me organise thoughts, explore alternatives and see a problem from an unfamiliar angle. Sometimes they operate like a mirror; sometimes like a very fast studio assistant; sometimes like a challenging conversation. But the tool cannot decide what I am trying to protect through my work. It cannot determine why one memory continues to return, why a particular symbol belongs in a painting, or why an aesthetically successful result still feels emotionally false. Those decisions require a personal stake in the outcome. In my ongoing project Human Garden, paintings, ceramics, objects and installations grow from questions of memory, relationships, vulnerability and belonging. A root is not merely a decorative form. A bud is not simply a botanical image. Each symbol becomes part of a connected visual world because of the human experiences carried into it. The viewer does not need to know every private story behind the work. The purpose of a symbol is not to close meaning but to open it. Someone may recognise something of their own life within an image that began in mine. That exchange cannot be calculated in advance. Living and working in Clare has also made me think about how differently a place can be seen. The person who has known a landscape all their life may carry a depth of memory that a newcomer cannot possess. Yet the newcomer may notice what familiarity has made almost invisible. Neither perspective is complete. Meaning appears in the meeting between them. Perhaps this is another form of creativity: allowing different ways of seeing to remain in conversation without forcing them into a single correct view. Technology is often designed to remove friction. It makes processes faster, cleaner and more predictable. Creative work frequently moves in the opposite direction. It needs pauses, uncertainty, repetition and the resistance of real materials. It needs time in which nothing impressive appears to be happening. Looking, doubting, revising and beginning again can seem inefficient. Yet these are often the moments in which a familiar idea becomes a personal one. The future of creativity will probably not be a simple contest between human beings and machines. The more important question is how human beings choose to work with the new tools available to them. Will we use AI to deepen our curiosity or merely to accelerate production? Will it help us consider more possibilities, or will we accept its first polished answer because it is convenient? Will we remain responsible for our choices, or gradually confuse technical fluency with understanding? A machine can propose. A person must decide what matters and accept responsibility for that decision. Perhaps the greatest danger is not that machines will create too much, but that people will stop noticing. We may become so accustomed to immediate answers that we lose patience with the slower process of forming a meaningful question. Creativity has never belonged exclusively to artists. It appears whenever someone looks beyond the obvious, recognises a connection and gives it a form that did not exist before. That capacity will not become less important in the age of artificial intelligence. It may become one of the clearest ways in which we recognise the value of human thought. AI may multiply the answers available to us, but human creativity begins with deciding what is worth noticing, and which questions are worth asking. Tania Bond is an Ennis-based contemporary visual artist whose practice explores Naive Symbolism and Emotional Cartography.