a few NEW thoughts on being creative

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Happy Thursday! I recently read a post at Deb’s World about embracing creativity. She wrote about how she doesn’t particularly view herself as being a “creative”. But as she thought more about the things she does on a daily basis, she discovered that she (and everyone) embraces creativity differently and uniquely. I agree.

I also don’t view myself as being creative. But I’m a huge wannabe creative!

Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognise ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.

I suppose the more one attempts to be creative, the more likely they’ll gain and/or strengthen their tendency to generate ideas. I have a little sewing table in my laundry room and above that table I put the quote attributed to Albert Einstein that says, “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Haha! That’s typically my style of creativity. Finding something I can be inspired by, and basically copying it. Sometimes (but not always) I can put my own spin on it, to make it more of my own creation. It just depends.

Take poetry, for instance. My mother was a prolific poet. Me – well, I can never think of the right words! Therefore, below is a poem generated with AI! My contribution was creatively giving AI the prompts to get started, based on the photo I recently took of these roses, (still in bloom in November!), in a little town in Kentucky.


Frost whispers secrets the twilight keeps.
Yet there—against the fading gray,
A pink rose blooms, defying decay.

Its petals blush with summer’s song,
A tender flame where nights grow long.
Soft fragrance drifts through brittle air,
A promise kept, though time seems spare.

The world turns bare, the branches lean,
But roses dream of what has been.
And in their bloom, a truth is shown—
Beauty endures, though cold winds moan.

So let November’s silence fall,
The pink rose answers winter’s call.
A fleeting gift, a fragile sign,
That hope still blossoms out of time.

And here’s a haiku to complement the longer poem, distilling the mood into a fleeting moment (also AI-generated):

Pink roses linger,  
November frost breathes silence—  
Hope warms the cold air.

With AI changing how we do things at a rapid pace, particularly some traditionally “creative” things, AI is being discussed quite a bit. What are your thoughts about AI and creativity? How is AI going to play into people’s creativity? I’d be interested in knowing your opinion!

I hope you have a great day and do or learn something NEW today!

10 thoughts on “a few NEW thoughts on being creative”

  1. It’s funny because just this weekend I took AI for a spin. I found a site that lets me put music to my poetry giving them a more vibrant life. While the whole AI debate is complex I am having fun playing with it having it do what I can’t – create music. But I want it to stay away from what I can’t do – the words. One site offered to “clean up” my lyrics a bit and I was insulted! Sure, my words may not be perfect but they are mine.

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    • That’s so interesting. I didn’t know there such a site exists – but it makes sense that it does. I might try it with some of the mother’s poetry. Thanks! Would you mind sharing the name of the site?

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      • Sorry, I should have included it to begin with. It is called Mureka.ai

        Of course there is a subscription fee. I went with the basic plan for a year and I already have my money’s worth since Sunday. And I still have more to play with! I mean, it is AI so it’s not perfect but it sure is fun. 🤩

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  2. What an interesting question about AI. My partner, Pedro, works in health research and is excited about the future uses of AI. He has taken MIT and Carnegie Mellon courses to educate himself about NLP, or Natural Language Processing. This is teaching computers to correctly interpret human language. (Hopefully that means the problems Terry has experienced will be reduced in the future.) He is using AI to comb through huge amounts of medical records to do research.

    For example, they recently made strides in a study trying to learn more about the dangers of guns in homes. People go to the doctor for a wellness check, let’s say, and the reason the patient is there has nothing to do with guns or safety. But the doctor might ask if they have any daily stress, and a parent might say, “I worry that there is an unsecured gun in the home with my child.” Just a random note added to a patient’s chart. The people in this study trained AI to find all the different ways to talk about firearms, then scoured an amount of medical records that would be too huge for humans to ever practically look at. With this information, then they can give educated suggestions about the kinds of dangers in the homes of patients, and begin trying to find ways to keep them safer, or to offer them help.

    I have heard that AI is much, much better than humans at some kinds of medical diagnosis. One area is scanning MRI images in detecting cancer vs. a benign blob, for example. AI does a better job of accurate diagnosis.

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  4. Because of negative personal experiences, I have many issues with AI, Lenore. One of these is that it’s being used more and more in medicine – specifically to dictate notes. If the ai recorder doesn’t understand what’s being dictated, it makes something up. I had such an x-ray report this past summer. Even my GP said it made no sense at all and some of the terms were non-existent. I firmly believe that this is a dangerous practice. If you Google, “How accurate is ai?”, you’ll be surprised at Google’s ai overview answer. As far as using it for creativity, I do appreciate its assistance in photo editing. That said, I feel challenged and encouraged to take good photos from the outset vs relying on ai to fix them. I know it’s everywhere and impossible to avoid completely. There are just some areas where it frightens me.

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