Antígona i els Fenicis

This is a personal thought, written on the fly, about human creativity and AI. Beyond the debates about copyright, political biases, resource consumption, or possible limits in the development of superintelligences, one of the few certainties of our time is that generative AI is based on the noble art of statistics. That is, it will respond to any given prompt with the “average” answer from all the accumulated information.

Yes, you can pitch it up and down. And yes, that's useful if “average” is the answer you want. There are countless real-world practical applications for that and AI can profoundly transform our economy and our labour system, for just this incontestable fact. That's why I voted “no” in a recent Mastodon poll about whether AI was a bubble equivalent to cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Which isn't to say there isn't a bubble; yes it is, and it's bigger than all the previous ones combined.

But that beeing said, what if average isn't what you're looking for? What if you're delegating in AI something that only you and your fellow humans can do, that is, to invent? In Spanish or Catalan (Latin roots helps us) there's another way to say average (la media) when it's tasteless, commonplace, undesirable: It's called medio-crity.

If we're talking about creativity, we're talking about Berghain and Zohran. What two poetic uncommon words! We're talking about innovation, disruption, going against the expected.

Sorry for that, but I asked an AI (any AI), to prove my point: Think of the name most likely to win a US election for a fictional character. For those lacking context, a guy called Zohran Mamdani, Muslim, immigrant, socialist, just won New York City mayoral election (2025).

That's the answer:

Analyzing the names of historical and recent US politicians and presidents, we look for characteristics that tend to resonate well with the electorate: Simplicity and Familiarity: Names that sound like ordinary people but with authority (e.g., George, John, Joe, Bill). Historical Resonance: Names that evoke founding or successful figures (e.g., Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy). Strength and Tradition: Surnames that sound strong or have Anglo-Saxon/traditional roots. Based on this, a name with a high theoretical probability of winning would be a combination that sounds traditional, strong, and easy to remember. The Name with the Highest Chance: “Jack Harrison.”

And it continues to reason, with its smart nuke-powered mediocrity…

First Name: Jack. It's a short and very popular form of John (the name of two presidents) or James (another name of two presidents). It's informal, approachable, and friendly, resonating with the image of a “man of the people” (like Jack Kennedy or Jack Clinton). Surname: Harrison. It evokes William Henry Harrison (9th president) and his grandson Benjamin Harrison (23rd president). It sounds strong, traditional, and patriotic. The surname itself carries historical weight without being as common as Smith or Johnson. In short, for a fictional character, “Jack Harrison” combines modern accessibility with the weight of American presidential tradition.

True-ish? Maybe. Nevertheless, before you can stop to consider whether everything it said makes sense or is just slop, it will surely lead you nowhere else but to keep digging in your creative failure:

Would you like me to come up with a brief political platform or slogan for Jack Harrison?

NO, THANKS.

Time to talk about Rosalía. I'm not a fan (especially of her reggaeton-urban songs, I have to admit), but I like her as a person (and I share many of her cultural references, as a fellow Barcelonian). But most, I admire how carefully she manages her campaigns and artistic choices. I like to deep dive into what she does and why she does it. As with any American election campaign, we're talking about state-of-the-art-humans in the field of marketing and communication. A word of advice: Ignore cheap YouTube gurus and simply observe what people who work well are doing, i.e. the teams behind “brands” like Rosalía or Mamdani.

Imagine the scene. Expectations for the new album are insanely high. The only certainty is that it won't be Motomami 2, just as Motomami wasn't El Mal Querer 2.

Rosalía is on holiday at her parents, watching TV. It's Sunday night, and the last thing she wants to do is to work on the piano or, worse, the computer. But she can't stop side-thinking about it… What's my next move?

The background movie is The Fifth Element. She's obviously not Bruce Willis, she's Milla Jovovich. Then SHE appears: Diva Plavalaguna. Rosalía takes note: Björk must have seen this movie, right? She's a boomer. Damn, I really need to talk to her about this movie. Dad, what's the name of that movie again? (* This story is fictional, of course, but plausible).

The only possibility that an AI could have provided some hint to release Berghain would have been what they call hallucination. But, my friend, that's a bug, not a feature, so if everything goes as investors expect, that should happen less and less frequently.

Rosalía is following in the footsteps of great artists like Björk, Bowie Madonna or Mercury: people who take every chance to question everything and do not panic to reinvent themselves. I find this line she casually drops in this podcast quite revealing.

“Qui li hagués dit a Picasso deixa de pintar de blau? NINGÚ” (Who would told Picasso to stop painting blue? NO ONE.)

Can you imagine an AI generating Picassos in 1904? I mean, blue, realistic Picassos, literally forever. Can you imagine Picasso himself trusting AI's hyper-mediocre advices for his next series? Fortunately, he moved to Paris to paint pink harlequins. He got bored again. Then he moved to Gósol (Pyrenees), to paint African masks... Don't get me wrong, artists don't create art from thin air. They copy. They copy a lot. But they copy the unexpected (Harleqins Picasso, really? Plavalaguna Rosalía, really?) So copy your friends and masters without hesitation, just as Rosalía copies Madonna and Björk. Just as Gris, Gargallo, Braque, and even Picasso and Cézanne copied each other, with love and admiration. The only way to be creative is to copy until you're bored, until eventually you find something else, something yours.

Let's copy like humans again.

Dame un LikeFreely | Antigona i els Fenicis es el blog personal de Pau Kokura con licencia CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Escrito con Inteligencia Animal | Contacta en kokura.design