The Ghost in the Machine

A Brief History of Creative Anxiety

Back in April, I gave keynotes at Chapman University and DePaul’s AI in the Arts Symposium. Both talks circled the same question: what happens to creativity when machines start mimicking it? That question stuck with me. In the weeks that followed, I kept pulling on that thread. Through conversations with artists, educators, and a few very opinionated engineers.

This piece is where I ended up. It draws a line from Jonathan Swift’s imaginary word engine to the generative tools we use today, and asks what it really means to create when fluency is easy but meaning still takes work.

A machine built from memory and code. Everything digitized, everything glowing. This is where we begin…

A Familiar Fear

We’ve stumbled into a moment where creativity isn’t earned—it’s summoned. Type the right words, and out spills a love letter, a legal brief, even a eulogy. The blank page, once a rite of passage, is now a prompt box.

In classrooms, boardrooms, and social feeds, a new kind of author is emerging. One who doesn’t invent so much as orchestrate. Crank the wheel, tune the output, spit and polish. It all arrives fast. Smooth. Slick. And, at times, a little too polished.

Which makes us twitch. We ask:

• If it’s stitched from the past, can it still be original?

• If it mimics meaning, does it mean anything at all?

• And if it’s this easy, can it really be called creative?

These questions feel new and yet they are not. But Jonathan Swift was already poking at them in 1726.

The rest of this piece follows the thread—from Swift’s wooden word engine to modern AI models generating scenes, sentences, and songs on demand. If you’re finding value in these deep dives, becoming a paid subscriber helps keep them coming.