After dismantling the myth of originality for four episodes, it’s time for the punchline: creativity isn’t under threat. Our ability to distinguish a vision from its imitation is.
When the comedy group Axis of Awesome performs their famous "4 Chords" medley, the audience usually goes through two distinct phases.
If we strip away the romantic fluff, art history is nothing more than the evolution of computer graphics—just stretched over thousands of years because the hardware was garbage.
We are terrified that AI is blindly recombining data. But between Jung’s archetypes and Campbell’s monomyth, we might just be scared that it’s doing exactly what we do—only faster.
We think we invented data protection in the age of CPUs. We didn't. We just gave fancy names to tricks used by 17th-century mapmakers and paranoid monks.