Artistic Intelligence
- Elena Cheah
- Aug 5
- 6 min read
The AI we need to cultivate now
I would never start an essay with a platitude like this:
We are all artists.
If I did, and you didn’t think of yourself as one, you would stop reading immediately.
The salient truth buried under the saccharine cliché is that we can’t stop the flow of creation that moves through us at all times from moment to moment. Whatever we believe about ourselves—who we are, the brilliant talents or destructive tendencies we harbor in the unexplored realms of our consciousness—if we really stopped and humbly sensed what it is to be human, we would have to admit that there is a presence that moves through us at all times, whether we like it or not. That presence, I would argue, is what creates: speech, movement, images, stories, ideas.
And yet I meet the most accomplished people who are convinced they are not creative, or at least not creative enough. They would like to be creating but are stopped by the constellation of beliefs that include phrases like ‘not good enough,’ ‘too late,’ ‘not a real artist.’
Many people assume that, because I am a musician, I think of myself as an Artist with a capital A. This is not the case. In fact, my classical music training had very little to do with honing the creative process; I had to learn to navigate that territory on my own, picking up bits of wisdom from various sources and experimenting with them.
Like so many people who formally studied an artistic pursuit, I learned early on that Art is something made by mostly deceased white European men who were chosen to communicate godliness to us lowly folk.
When I went on to higher education, the regard for Art grew more granular. In the 1990s and 2000s, we still only worshipped male artists, but we also studied their unfinished drafts. We were given permission to peek behind the perfect facade of chiseled completion we had grown up admiring. Still, as classical musicians, we were not encouraged to create anything ourselves—god forbid experiment—unless we were composition majors, in which case we were ordered to spend all our time composing.
We still treated the works we studied as a precious and limited resource to analyze, discuss, and lock up in the canon considered worthy of reverence, protection, and funding. There was no acknowledgment of kinship between our artistic yearnings and those of the masters. Contemporary composers were either siloed into tiny niches of the classical music subculture or sandwiched apologetically between Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in subscription concerts.
We see the contents of the confirmed canon on literal pedestals in museums, guarded under glass in archives, and reproduced on t-shirts, in recordings, and in advertising. And it is this canon that is now being fed to AI as the standard to which we humans aspire.
I have largely removed myself from the hype and panic of discussions about AI in art, but what is crystallizing for me is this: if we have a tool—and I still believe AI is just a tool, albeit an unwieldy and willful one—that can ‘create’ anything based on what we feed it, then human artistic intelligence does not diminish in significance, it grows.
When we go to a museum or a performance as pure spectators and we point in wonder and reverence to the Art that has been ordained as such, we are usually not engaging with it; we are worshipping it. When we worship, we build a wall between ourselves and the Artists. We see our own thinking and understanding of the world around us as a different species from the mind that produced the work before us. The feeling of awe that rightly surges forth in our hearts as we experience art is immediately converted into comparison with our plebeian minds that could never produce anything close to a masterpiece.
Artists, on the other hand, have always existed in community, critiquing each other’s work openly, presenting it behind closed doors with other trusted artists. To engage with the work at eye level as a co-creator gives it life and relevance; it opens you up to be transformed by it.
In 2026, we find ourselves in a world where AI can now generate ‘art,’ where unschooled humans can direct a machine to create something that looks or sounds or reads very much like what we call great art. And if anyone or any machine can do that, then it seems obvious that the canon will eventually begin to dismantle itself, and in the absence of a canon, there can be no worship of perfection that separates us from the act of creation.
In my best-case scenario, artificial intelligence is a tool for artistic intelligence, which is the great potential I see in our time. AI levels the playing field for all who have access to it—a glaring caveat that needs to be addressed—and also confronts us with some grand questions about how we want to live.
To name a few from the creative standpoint:
Is the goal of creation to generate masterpieces that are universally respected?
Or is it a matter of spiritual hygiene?
Why are we born with the ability to imagine what we have never seen or experienced?
Why does it feel like something in us has died when we are not making something with our hands or our imagination?
Why have we used our collective hands until now to destroy our Mother Earth?
Why have we used our precious imagination to serve ideas that do not serve us?
Why are we continuing to recreate, through our thoughts and actions, the known world in which everything is out of equilibrium?
What if we stepped back from everything and took time to fathom the unknown world we are now capable of creating when we tap into the infinite resource of human imagination and combine that with the powerful technology at our disposal?
As Krista Tippett put it recently in an essay you should read,
“What if AI is here to bring us literally back to our senses?”
Back at Juilliard, by focusing on a certain standard of performance, we were mostly learning to calibrate ourselves into extremely accurate, aesthetically educated machines. We spent our hours in the practice room polishing the cornices of the worldview that everything worthwhile already exists. We were, in effect, making ourselves obsolete for the era we are now entering. That is what perfectionism does: it worships perceived greatness and attempts to recreate it.
Machines can do this now too.
Artistic intelligence, unlike artificial intelligence, is born out of play. Play is not only the opposite of perfectionism, it is the antidote to it. It is embodied curiosity; it is a probing conversation with the mysterious workings of the universe. It seems useless to our capitalism-dominated mindset, but play is never just play; it is exploration, it is invention, it is communication with the outer and inner worlds.
Creation is an essential aspect of human nature without which our spirit shrivels. And in my experience, the individual creative faculty is either growing or shrinking; it knows no homeostasis.
When it comes to creation in our bewildering era, we can now either continue to outsource our judgment to an aesthetic authority that is increasingly dominated by machines fed with the contents of the ivory tower, or we can cultivate the practice of play, which grows the muscle of artistic intelligence.
Yes, the practice of play.
It is a practice.
It is what all artists do, and even if you would never dare call yourself one, there is an artist that runs through your veins and spirals through your DNA, and it is waiting for you to dream up and sketch out the world you want to live in.
I am waiting for you to dream up and sketch out the world you want to live in.
Will you build the beautiful world that’s waiting for you?
If this spoke to you, I want to hear from you, specifically from those of you who know you have something to create, however much you would deny your creative powers or talents.
I’m cultivating a group that will comprise The Creation Circle, a transformative community that turns the solitary work of creating into a meaningful individual and collective journey.
If you need this, I want you to be able to participate, no matter your financial situation.
Read about it and send me a personal note or book a call to talk to me about it.
This is my life’s work, so I take every message seriously.
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