When Creation Stops Revealing the Creator
What does reading an excerpt from a literary work reveal to you about its writer?
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
They come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
For me, even if I don’t know who the writer is, those lines alone say a lot about him: maturity in thinking, a refined taste for language and expression, someone deeply spiritual, loving, and respectful of healthy boundaries. The same lines may reveal something else about this person to you.
This is true of every creation. The creator’s life and soul live through the creation and get transmitted to the receiver. This is not limited to literary works but extends to every form of human expression, whether you write a personal diary that you never show to anyone, a gratitude note, an apology letter, marketing copy, artwork, or even code.
Exactly two decades ago, I remember reading an op-ed in the national newspaper The Hindu titled “Hired by the Blog.” That was the time when platforms like Google’s Blogger and WordPress first enabled individuals to write on the internet. This op-ed was close to my heart because I saw myself portrayed in it. I had studied English literature, yet I was working in the tech field purely on the strength of my open-source contributions.
The op-ed described a new culture emerging in IT hiring: people were being hired for what they wrote on their personal blogs rather than for what they had studied academically or the certifications they held. Even though it was a “new culture” in the hiring space at that time, the practice of trusting someone through their creation is as old as humans themselves.
Until recently, I would hire a programmer by looking at their GitHub profile, or by asking them to send me a work sample. Today, with AI in use across almost every field, for the first time in human history the creation no longer guarantees anything about the creator, the very thing we have relied on all through the ages in our interactions with other people.
Every expression plays three roles
The first role of expression, in the context of what the world sees as utility, is the actual output the world receives. These are the paintings, the poems, the code, the essays, the books that people create.
The second role, in the context of the creator, is the shaping of the creator themselves in the process of creation. To understand it simply: if the first role of writing is to create a book, the second role of writing is to bring clarity of thought to the writer. The very act of creating something also shapes the creator. It is bi-directional.
Take another example. When an artist is at work, she may create a beautiful painting, but by putting herself through the demanding creative process, she also develops her taste, patience, perseverance, and many other invisible inner capacities that shape who she is. This is how it has always been with every form of human expression.
Today, with AI used to express and create, we have decoupled the visible output (role 1) from the inner formation (role 2) of the creator. This decoupling raises several developmental, cognitive, and spiritual questions, and it is the subject of the research I am currently pursuing, tentatively named “Skill–Formation Decoupling.” It is a big area of inquiry, and I don’t have all the answers now, or even all the questions. I will write about it in the coming months.
What I am exploring in this post is a second-order consequence of this decoupling: the third, invisible role that human expression has served in the context of society.
This third role is enabling people to trust each other and form relationships of every kind. It is so common and so intertwined with our lives that we hardly recognize it, like a fish not recognizing the water it swims in.
When I listen to a beautiful song, I form a relationship with the composer or the lyricist as a fan.
When my wife reads a heartfelt apology letter from me, it strengthens her trust in me.
When leaders, be it Martin Luther King or Vivekananda, give a great speech, people are inspired and begin to follow them.
All these relationships form or grow stronger because expression lets us trust the person, through the bi-directional nature we just saw. Decades after Martin Luther King said “I have a dream,” he still gathers followers, because we humans intrinsically sense that such a speech could not be faked. It comes from a heart that is trustworthy and worthy of admiration.
Contrast this, let’s say, with a beautiful gratitude note I receive from a friend today. My friend could have genuinely felt touched by my action and taken the time to find the right words to express the inexpressible. Or he could have felt the gratitude but used AI to improve his language. Or he felt nothing at all while his faithful AI agent read through his daily data and auto-responded with a nice message, doing its job. The note reads the same in all three cases. The artifact of the gratitude note alone no longer tells me anything about my friend. Instead, it leaves me doubting: did my friend actually notice all the small details, or did an AI wearable pick up the signals, match the pattern, and choose the best course of action?
In the past, when I received a letter, I didn’t go through a “yes I like it, but let me first clear my doubt and look for proof” phase before I appreciated it. If I felt touched by the letter, appreciation was my spontaneous response. “Doubting” was not a layer I had to cross. But today, irrespective of whether I feel moved by it or not, doubt has already entered. I am the same old fish, but the water I swim in is new, and this new water itself infuses doubt.
What troubles me most is not the friend who felt nothing and whose AI agent faked a gratitude note. It is the friend who actually took the time to write, and the friend who genuinely felt it in his heart but used AI for expressing it. In the new AI ocean, it is not the bad actor gaining an undue privilege but the good ones losing trust, or having to prove they are genuine.
While the example I cited above is from a personal space, the problem percolates to all domains. The following is an excerpt from a real email I received from a former team member:
I am creating my company website and am excited to launch a dedicated Partners section to highlight the organisations we value and work with.
As an esteemed partner, I would love to include Talam’s logo on this page to showcase our association.
My goal is to make sure your brand is represented perfectly. Once the section is live, I’ll be sure to share the link with you so you can take a look!
I know this team member had problems communicating in English. So at first glance, I could immediately smell that he didn’t write it. I don’t mind that. But what proof assures me that he actually felt the wish to “highlight the organisations we value and work with”? Is my organisation really his “esteemed partner”? Does he really understand everything needed to ensure the “brand is represented perfectly”? AI merely saying these things does not make him capable or even aware of everything claimed.
This is not one isolated incident. The meetings I attend with many vendors as part of my consulting work now have all their progress-report presentations made by AI. The project manager reads an AI-generated script while presenting the report. Neither what I see on the screen nor what I hear from the manager is useful for me to develop the trust I once had spontaneously.
This is not to say that society before AI was always trusting, always using original content, or that there were no bad actors. We had speechwriters, ghostwriters, people cheating with plagiarism, and so on. But to fake the output without the formation was expensive, or time-consuming, or both. What AI has changed is the economics: creating a convincing fake is now both cheap and instant, while detecting the difference between the human-made and the AI-made has become costlier for the rest of us. The economics have inverted, and it breaks the unspoken social contract on which our entire society depends.
Ironically, Gibran’s lines on children, the opening lines of this post, describe the tragedy of today’s AI-generated creations:
They come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
It is worth pondering what it means when creations come through us
without transforming us,
and reaches others without revealing us.