It was still the happiest day of my life.
Despite the heat, the hangover and the endless questions. Despite the shoestring that I had self-imposed, and the rice in our bed.
I write that, and then I ask myself, was it really? I don’t know. It’s like one of those trick candles, you blow it out to calls of “make a wish”, blink, make your wish, smile, in what you hope is not an appreciative grimace, and, in that time, it’s magically managed to reignite. Perfect. I’m not sure that’s how a marriage counsellor would recommend someone classify their nuptials, but I’ve decided that’s pretty much it.
I don’t really talk about it. Any of it, there were no official photos, no band, no music. I ordered champagne, and it tasted like ash – but that could have been the hangover. If it was good, it certainly went downhill after that. I have wondered why I don’t write about it, why I can’t write about it. And then I decide I don’t really want to know the answer, so I skirt around it…
Today, I want to talk about innovation. And art. To me, good art has always been about learning the rules of engagement and then learning how to break them. Think about the Mona Lisa and then think about Tracy Emin’s Unmade Bed. Is breaking those rules innovation for innovation’s sake, or does it seek to be something more? I’m pondering this because someone told me the other day, we don’t need writers anymore, we have AI – specifically, ChatGPT. As someone who has always written, I find that hard to stomach. My dad says AI is like the industrial revolution; he waves his hands a lot and dismisses it as a solution for labour-intensive economic burden. In dispersing that burden, we encourage innovation and evolution. A certain part of me thinks he might have a point, but as he determinedly continues to try to break Claude, it also makes me wonder where creativity fits in.
If I am honest, I know exactly where it fits. It fits between the Mona Lisa and Tracey Emin’s bed. Why? Because technology is an invention, it’s an invention that does something for something. It can draw my house plans, write me a song, or a Haiku, then tell me I’m a Sleeping Beauty and make me look that way. It can do whatever I want it to do in whatever context I choose, if I have the ability to use it. I choose the why, AI, executes the what. And, what it can’t do is have the foresight to come up with the innovation in the first place. I asked ChatGPT as a test, and this is what it said,
“Short answer: it’s not a single off-the-shelf product — but yes, someone could absolutely make it, and yes, it would work.
What I described is a real, buildable hybrid made from technologies that already exist”
That is a perfect example: Technology without creativity is optimisation, not innovation,
an arrangement of what already exists. It makes the machine quieter, faster, and smoother. But it does not decide why the machine should exist, or whether it should exist at all. That, at least for the moment, is still my decision. So, Dad is half right: mechanisation freed bodies from labour (albeit putting them into a different type of labour), but it didn’t free meaning. In fact, it created a hunger for it. The arts didn’t disappear after industrialisation; they intensified.
Tracey Emin’s bed is messy, so is innovation. Her bed, the whole life of cluttered depression, poverty, love gone sour, was sold for £2.5 million. It wasn’t an innovation that came from rule-breaking alone; it just made sense. To her, it had been her life, and therefore it was art. The installation of her bed was an inevitability, not a rebellion. The magic, the bit that creatives all strive for, is the understanding of what rules are worth breaking, and the making of those decisions, that’s innovation. In comparison, my trusty AI can break all the rules without the capability to decide which ones are worth breaking.
I can still see that candle; it’s in my mind, flickering, the same way it does when I think I see him get off a bus or remember what it was like to need a lock on my bedroom door. It never seems to burn lower; it just exists, contained and, for the moment, unreachable. I know that I decide when, or how, or if, I turn those moments into stories. That choice is both an artistic and a human decision.
For now, that candle is still smoking. That is creativity, and that is my decision.
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