Throughline - No Bad Ideas?

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Humans have always created. But historian Samuel W. Franklin argues that "creativity" didn't become a social value until the Cold War. Today, we're at another inflection point for humanity, technology, and national identity. The meaning of originality is blurring; there are legal disputes about what constitutes original art; and AI can write a song like your favorite artist in seconds. So what does it mean to put creativity on a pedestal? And what would it look like to tear it down? On this episode, we talk with Franklin, author of "The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History," about original thinking, AI, and how the human drive to create gets branded, packaged, and sold.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. In this session, we are going to unlock your creativity. If you've seen any creativity video, TED Talk, speech, if you've had a consultant come into your work to talk to you about creativity, if you've opened any one of these books on creativity,

they all basically do a similar set of moves. One is to, is what I call the dispelling of myths. It's been one of the longstanding myths of creativity that it's, you know, some kind of all or none phenomenon and you either got it or you don't. And they all say that there's a myth that creativity is only for artists. It's more than just artistic expression. Actually, creativity is applicable to anything and is super important in anything. And they'll list a few things. Whether you're working in retail or you're in an office job or even if you're a professional athlete,

you're probably using creativity to make decisions and solve problems on a daily basis. The other myth is that creativity is only for geniuses. We shouldn't be intimidated. We lesser mortals by people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan. Actually, to the contrary, creativity is something that we all possess. Even if you think you're not a creative person, I have a really good feeling that you are.

But for various reasons, it's been kind of stifled in us. You know, a lot of people really struggle to give themselves permission to be creative. So they promise you everything and anything. You want to live in a creative way, which will benefit everything in your life. It can help you be successful at work. I mean all I've got guys is creativity that's it that's my job. Be just more satisfied and more fulfilled as a person. The more creative you are the more successful you'll become it's as simple as that. Only it's not that simple. The term creativity itself, even though it sounds really old,

didn't arrive until the 20th century and really until like the middle of the 20th century. It's not until the 50s that it becomes a part of our everyday lexicon. And then it just explodes. This is Sam Franklin. He teaches at De Luft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I'm also the author of a book called The Cult of Creativity, a surprisingly recent history. Sam heard the TED Talks and saw the self-help books and corporate memoirs,

and he started to wonder why creativity was such a buzzword in Western culture. How did creativity become this thing that we all kind of bow down to? Like, it seems like it's this thing that everybody loves, nobody says anything bad about, which is very suspicious. His research led him to an actual starting point, a moment in U.S. history when anxieties about technology and conformity led to an explosion of interest in what made Americans and their values unique, special, and superior.

The concept of creativity arises as a container to mash together romantic ideas about art and poetry and self-expression and self-creation with older ideas about ingenuity and inventiveness and mechanical innovativeness. And it mashes those together, the practical and the impractical, the serious and the whimsical, the profit-driven and the kind of self-driven. And it mashes those together because those are the contradictions that are tearing at the post-war era. The very idea that there is this thing called creativity that encompasses all of these human desires and abilities to make something new in some kind of general sense is an idea that was packaged and solidified in the 1950s and 60s

and continuing on to this day, to make you think that it's always been there, to make you think that it's human nature. That's the invention. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Arablui. We're at another inflection point for humanity, technology, and national identity.

The idea of originality is blurring. There are legal disputes about what constitutes original art. AI can help write a song like your favorite artist in seconds now. So what does it mean to put creativity on a pedestal? And what would it look like to tear it down? Coming up, the human drive to create gets branded, packaged, and sold. Hi, this is Mayra Martinez from Los Angeles, California.

You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from CBC Podcasts. Split Screen Thrill Seekers is a new six-part series that exposes how a TV show left contestants struggling to trust what's actually real. Listen now. Creativity is a big topic. So to start our conversation with Sam Franklin, author of the book The Cult of Creativity, we first had to define what exactly he means when he says creativity was invented and not,

you know, a natural part of life. So can you define for us really like how the modern notion of creativity, you know, how you would define it and where that definition sort of originates? Obviously, people have been doing art for a really long time. People have been inventing new gadgets for a very long time. People have been expressing themselves. They've been clever. They've had life hacks. They've been doing all this stuff for a really long time. And they've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And sometimes they've been doing all this stuff for a really long time and they've been thinking about this stuff for a long time and sometimes they've been thinking about what those things have in common so the idea that there's a a kind of human desire for novelty that's not new the idea that there's

a certain kind of particularly human ability to create that's not new that actually comes out of kind of the renaissance enlightenment romantic era like that's kind of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic era, like that's kind of the big thought innovation of that day, that creation wasn't just God's purview that actually humans could create. That's an old idea. Creativity kind of seems like it just is the same thing as that idea. But for some reason, they never use that word. And it's because it's only in the post-war era that they need to make it a thing, an object, a particular individual human trait. And that's where you get the I-T-Y on the end of creative, because that turns it into a noun. We're talking about some general trait that could be responsible for novelty in any realm. Sam traces creativity's entry into our vocabulary to the 1950s and 60s, the beginning of the Cold War. So creativity arises in the post-war era because of a confluence of crises. So you've got the Cold War, which is on the home front, a race for technology against the Soviets. You've got a real fear substantiated that we're falling behind in technology. You've got a fear of conformity, that the suburbs and the Gravel and Allsuit and consumer society is making everyone into mindless drones. You've got a fear of computers to a certain extent, that white-collar work is

going to be automated and that we needed to kind of stay ahead of the curve. And you've got a sense that the country is sort of losing its soul as a technological, as a consumer society, that it doesn't stand for anything larger than that. And creativity kind of encapsulates all of the fixes to this stuff. You've got the innovation, you've got the transcendent self-expression, you've got the individualism, and you've got the kind of the thing

that the computers supposedly can't do. And you've got it all in one nice little package. So much of world history is determined by like one empire or one other center of power trying to distinguish itself from other ones. So everything from religion to language to race, all these different things have been used to say, this is the line where we are us, our empire is us, and that empire is them. The other

empire is them. Our competition is them. And from your argument, it seems like creativity was, during the Cold War period, after World War II, a way for Americans to distinguish themselves from the communist or Soviet world. Can you talk a little bit more about the emergence of the idea of creativity and diversion thinking with individuality and how that kind of sits opposed to what the view was of what was happening in the Soviet Union or in China or the rest of the world? So America has a long history of like defining itself by its individualism, but the Cold War, the post-World War II period was like a high point of that. People are freaking out that Americans are not

educated enough, are not prepared to meet this threat. So there's people out there who are saying we need more math and science. We need to train up all these engineers. But there's other people who are out there saying, yes, but we need to do that in a way that is not stifling of individual dignity, individual choice. We need to do it in a way that's not Soviet style. Presumably the Soviets were just kind of inscripting all these engineers into service and that's how they were progressing technologically. America would progress technologically through more individualistic and kind of more soulful means, which is by being creative. So creativity was a kind of true American value in that it was individualistic, it was independent thinking, but it also as a byproduct resulted in superior technology. There's a long, a few kind of long running threads of American thoughts about what it means to be America that feed into this. So one is that Americans are always very mechanical and inventive. So this is a long running trope, but this is what makes us different from Europeans.

They like to faff around with their art and poetry. We get things done. We make machines. We're interested in mechanical things. That's why, you know, we ultimately won the Industrial Revolution. Now, that's questionable, but that's an idea about America. It's that we're kind of practical. There's this other idea, though, the kind of romantic transcendentalist idea, going back to, you know, Emerson, that America has a true romantic soul. But in this post-war moment, they kind of come together in this notion of the creative person who's kind of both, right? They're like very inventive, but they're also a true individual who's just sort of searching for truth. There were a few particular kind of clusters of people that were really responsible for

solidifying the idea, getting that word out there, getting that concept out there, producing the kind of the knowledge, the articles, the books, the things that you could refer to if you wanted to learn about this thing called creativity, and who are particularly responsible for like helping make creativity the thing that it is today and giving it the value that it has today. And that was basically a loose collection of psychologists and business management thinkers, research directors at kind of R&D labs, some people in the advertising industry, some people in education, educational psychology, who all kind of came together around this concept. So, for example, the psychologists. In 1950, the president of the American Psychological

Association, his name was J.P. Guilford, he got up on stage at the annual conference and he gave a speech called Creativity, where he urged all of his psychological community to study creativity. Guilford got up on stage and said, I discussed the subject of creativity with considerable hesitation, for it represents an area in which psychologists generally, whether they be angels or not, have feared to tread. And he bemoaned the fact that psychology had theretofore basically ignored creativity, and he thought that this was a tragedy, and that everyone should turn their attention to creativity

and to uncovering the mysteries of creativity. So Guilford gets up there and he gives this speech saying that we need to study creativity. The reasons he gave included the need for more innovation. He also notes the rise of computers, what he calls thinking machines, which he thinks will ostensibly soon automate almost every sort of normal white collar brain work job, leaving the only thing left for people to do would be creative thinking, which he thought of as a distinctly human trait, one that machines would never be able to do. He paints this broad picture of a new frontier of creativity research

that psychology had previously been afraid to delve into because it seemed mysterious and it seemed romantic. And he wanted to kind of clear away the thicket of romantic thinking, of these ideas of mad geniuses, and that creativity is this kind of ineffable thing, or the creative urge or genius is this ineffable thing, inspiration, we can't pin it down. He wanted to try to pin it down. He's like, we're scientists, we can do this. And it's this very ambitious project. He was actually waging a very particular kind of disciplinary battle within his subfield of psychology. So Guilford was a psychometrician, which means he was in the business of measuring cognitive abilities. So you think of IQ tests and intelligence tests. This is the field that

he's coming out of. And he was making the argument that intelligence tests, as they existed at that time, were not suited to the era that they were entering. That they were good at recognizing people, again, who are very kind of competent and smart, and they'd be good at doing a lot of mathematical equations, but that they weren't good at identifying true geniuses, true original thinkers, people who are really going to make the new breakthroughs that America needed at that time. But when they got right down to it, it was really hard to figure out how to actually know who's a creative person, what's a creative product, how do you know it when you see it? So there's a particular set of

studies at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at University of California, Berkeley. So the studies at IPAR were involved, them identifying very eminent, famous architects like Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph and famous writers like Truman Capote and really famous mathematicians who was, of course, not as publicly famous. But they identified like the best mathematicians and they'd bring them into this office they had in this former fraternity house at the edge of campus. And they would subject them over the course of like three or four days to just a series of weird psychological tests, like ranging from intelligence tests and divergent thinking tests, kind of cognitive tests, puzzles. They'd give them Rorschach inkblot tests. They would sit down with them and kind of psychoanalyze

them and try to get to the root of what was the creative personality. So they kind of like, they get really excited about all this research. They think it's like adding up to something. There's some edited volumes. There's a lot of feeling of like momentum. But at the same time, they're starting to kind of see that they might not all be talking about the same thing. They might not really be able to make their research talk to each other because of this problem of criteria,

of defining exactly what creativity is in any given study. And there's some people who start criticizing it kind of from outside. So I said that in 1950 that Guilford, who was the president of the American Psychological Association, sort of launched this creativity initiative. In 1964, the president that year gave this speech basically bashing creativity research, saying like, it doesn't make any sense. It's total confusion. But the pursuit of creativity was anything but done. Even though it kind of fell apart momentarily, it really still takes on a life of its own.

And you'll still find citations to that research today. Coming up, where psychologists see a quagmire, corporations see a goldmine. Hi, my name is Madeline. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, and I'm a high school vocal music teacher. ThruLine is awesome. Thanks for all of your hard work listening to ThruLine from NPR. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support.

If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. And you also get access to special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes, introduce you to our amazing producers, and tell you about how we make the show. To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash throughline. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. From the rise of design thinking in workplaces to our personal curation on social media, we're all living in the glow of the creativity boom. But even though humans have always created, creativity didn't become a social value until the Cold War.

Historian Sam Franklin argues that the modern Western idea of creativity, the kind you hear about in self-help books and TED Talks, has some distinct characteristics. It's fun and whimsical, but also useful and functional. And of course, you can often use it to create something you can sell. Why does man create? So chances are, if you went to school after about 1968, you have seen the short film Why Man Creates. It opens with this cute animation, kind of like schoolhouse rock style, black and white, of cavemen painting on caves. And then something falls on top of them, and it's another person inventing the wheel. Harry, do you realize you just invented the wheel? I know, I know.

And the motion, it speeds up and speeds up, and the camera kind of pans up, and this whole pile of new inventions come. And so we get the Stone Age and the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages, and then, like, it keeps going faster and faster and faster, and you get Freud and you get Darwin. Shall we start from the beginning? And then finally it stops, and on top of all this stuff,

there's this lone man standing on top of it. And he just yells into the void. So the title of the film is Why Man Creates. And it answers that by saying, Yet among all the variety of human expression, a thread of connection, a common mark can be seen. That urge to look into oneself and out of the world and say, this is what I am. I am unique.

We want to be seen. We want to say, here I am. So to understand this film, you have to understand the corporation that funded it. The funder was a corporation called Kaiser Aluminum, based out of Oakland, California, who was at that time manufacturing everything from like TV dinner trays to missile fuselages and everything in between. They also commissioned this film to plumb the mysteries of the creative process. And so it's a perfect encapsulation to me of like, we get this artifact that we see in school and kind of assume is just this philosophical meditation on creativity that is very artsy

and probably comes out of the arts, but was conceptualized and commissioned by a corporation that employed engineers who had wanted to be more creative so they could make more stuff for the consumer military industrial complex. That's not to say it was like evil or a conspiracy, but it just really speaks to like, who was actually behind? What was the engine of all this creativity stuff? And that's what it was. Sam says business interests were always a big part of the 1950s creativity boom. And even as the scientific study of creativity cooled, the business sector kept the market for creativity thriving. The market for creativity research is always people who are responsible for organizations, responsible for innovation, coming up with new ideas. You know, they say that necessity is the

mother of invention, but in the 1950s, that really kind of flipped. And you started seeing companies just trying to produce new products just for market share, just kind of flipped. And you started seeing companies just trying to produce new products, just for market share, just kind of for their own sake. So they've got a new technology or they've got an old technology. They put a team together and they say, okay, guys, can we come up with five new products using this material, using this technology, using this proprietary process? So like the conferences that I was talking about, the Creativity Research Conference, there were always corporate people at these conferences because they had an obvious interest in innovation and in how to select people. They're hiring thousands of engineers and they need to figure out how do they hire them,

how do they place them. But there's something interesting to them if they can understand the mind of the employee. The goal was to tap into the mind of the employee for more innovation. Sound familiar? Today, most of us have likely participated in the type of work activities that emerged from corporate America's search for creativity. Well, so we've all probably participated in a brainstorming session. I remember learning brainstorming in like fifth grade or something. Maybe it was to come up with ideas for a report on frogs or something. But it's something that

we all do. And like, it doesn't occur to any of us that it was new at any point or that it was invented. It just kind of seems like just this thing we do, but it was. It was invented and it was first introduced to people in the 40s and 50s, mostly the 50s, by this guy, Alex Osborne, who was an advertising executive out of Buffalo, New York. He was the O in the firm BBDNO, which was like one of the top three advertising firms. And it was a technique that they used in their office, where if they needed to come up with like a new slogan or a new marketing direction, they would kind of break out of business as usual. They'd get everyone together in a comfortable room and give a secretary a notepad and they just kind of let loose. And the secretary would write down every idea and there were strict rules. So no judgment,

no saying no. You had to say yes. It's kind of an yes and kind of vibe. Build off of people's ideas, get as crazy as you want. And they would also bring in in this was a big part of it it wasn't just the typical kind of top brass they would bring in people from wherever in the organization with the idea that everyone might have some ideas no matter how crazy that might end up being useful and then at the end of the session they would tally up all the answers and like the longer the list the more successful the session was deemed and then that would get passed up to some higher up who would then go through the list and figure out if there were any good ideas. So Osborne popularized this technique through an organization that he had. He went all across the country teaching brainstorming to all kinds of organizations.

It really took off mostly in the corporate world. And Osborne insisted that this could be used for any kind of problem and could be used to unleash anybody's creativity. He was one of those people who said, you know, people think of creativity as being something that's just for Einstein and Edison, but actually you too are creative. And brainstorming is one way that he could kind of prove that. So one of my favorite, I don't know, I love saying this over and over again, but scarcity is like a function of value, right? If the more rare something is, obviously more value has. Do you think the proliferation of creativity or people labeling themselves as such or feeling the pressure to be creative in the way you're describing is also kind of cheapening its value. The critic Alan Bloom wrote about this in his book, The Closing of the American Mind,

where he was like, now that everyone's creative, what does that even mean? And I get that. So yeah, it kind of cheapens it if you're invested in it being a scarce resource. The weird thing is, though, that it was in a way kind of invented to be democratized. It was contrasted with the concept of genius. So for example, those psychologists who I was talking about who were kind of embracing this term for the first time in psychology, they were saying, okay, we're building off of studies of genius. We're building off of studies of intelligence. We're also kind of rejecting some key aspects of those. But we're not interested in geniuses. We're not interested in genius. We're not interested in the select few. We're interested in something that everyone potentially has in some degree. you know with social media going back to those kind of like the influencer

universe and social media in particular where it feels like it feels like a generalized individualism like it's sort of like everyone can go to like as if like you can go to your local grocery store and you can pick up some creativity too. That's how it kind of feels like it operates, which leads me to wonder to what end, like what does that serve? What purpose does that serve? Do you think in terms of the kind of capitalist context to have everyone thinking, yeah, I'm creative too. And I, I have this, I can access this commodity too. Yeah. The thing about capitalism is it always needs new stuff.

It always needs more ideas, more products. And so I do think that that's one sort of obvious benefit then of kind of telling everyone that they should strive to come up with more stuff. And social media is a perfect example, right? Like TikTok, platforms like TikTok and Instagram, they literally are our creations. Like we make it, right? We give it our images. We give it our lives. We give it our ideas.

We give it our text. We give it our creativity in a sense. And so that's essential that we all sort of strive to be creative and, and feel like a little bit like artists or feel like we're expressing ourselves or feel like we're becoming sort of self-actualized people or, or at the very least cool and like good in the eyes of society by doing that. So that's, that's another way. I think another way is simply that you find this a lot in the business context. So in the book, I read about brainstorming and other creative thinking techniques that are all about unleashing creativity within a group context.

And there's kind of an undisturbed line from brainstorming in the 1950s to design thinking and stuff like that today. And if you crack open any one of those books or trainings or go to any, you know, have a consultant come, they'll always say, first thing, you might not think of yourself as creative, you know, speaking to a room full of buttoned down people who are not on the creative team. But I'm here to tell you, you are, you can be if you follow these kind of methods. And those methods are built for, I mean, to be kind of crassly Marxist about it, like extracting valuable ideas from those people's

heads, even though they don't own the IP in the end, right? So you could kind of see it as a way of priming people for their own exploitation. There's an element that dovetails with this, which I'm interested in talking more about, which is like self-help, like the self-help elements of creativity. The fact that it's often sold to us as a path through which we can self-actualize or become better human beings.

The quality of our humanness would improve if we're more creative. But how is that factored into the proliferation of this concept? I think we want to give some dignity and aura to everyday things, particularly in the world of work where a lot of us actually wonder if our work is meaningful at all. And we'd like to sort of see it as creative. And so I think for a lot of people, creativity is actually the realm of them trying to become something more meaningful or create some meaning in their lives outside of work and defining themselves as something else. And I think there's a very long tradition of

people finding meaning in making things and in craft. You know, one of the most powerful critiques of industrial work under capitalism is alienation, that by picking the making of things out into so many different components and having each person just kind of add one little bit, they miss that satisfaction of saying, here's a thing that needs to be made, I'm going to make it, and seeing it through from beginning to end. There's a very particular kind of satisfaction that that brings. That feeling of satisfaction is increasingly under siege. Even in the past year, advances in AI have brought up questions about whether humans actually are needed to produce creative work,

or whether computers can do it all instead. Coming up, how the rise of AI is changing our understanding of what it means to be creative, and what it might look like to give up on creativity altogether. My name is Joseph Lapp from Duluth, Minnesota. You are listening to ThruLine from NPR. Sam Franklin's book is called The Cult of Creativity, which if we're being honest, that's some very strong language because we have to ask, does our culture actually really venerate creativity to the point of cult status? You know, that's a catchy title, The Cult of Creativity. And I've got to ask, why did you choose to use the word cult?

It's funny. I told my mom that that was the title. And she's like, and about a week later, she said, Sam, I've been thinking, it sounds really negative. I think you should choose a new title. And it's funny because I think she couldn't imagine I was writing a book that said anything other than really glowing things about creativity. And so on one hand, it was kind of cult as this sense of like in the sense of a cult object, something that you kind of venerate unquestioningly. And I felt like we had gotten there with creativity and it was time to kind of pick it apart, take it down a few notches maybe. The other thing that I would add is that I talked about the book to a couple of colleagues the other day, and one of them had this really insightful thing to say, which was that when he thinks of cults, he thinks of something that's really hard to leave. And creativity feels like something that's really hard to disabuse yourself

of or to lose your investment in. Yeah. It's like that people have identities built around that word. Exactly. Yeah. You know, like I roll my eyes. I don't know. I mean, I wonder if, was there a little bit of that for you? Cause there's a little bit, you know, you see people put it on their like Instagram profile or some other social media profile, like creative, you know, like mother or father, wife, husband, creative. And it's like something along the list that seems weird and new. Exactly. I was raised being told I was creative and thinking I was creative and thinking that was the best thing that I could be, or at least if I wasn't going to be, you know, an athlete or a lawyer or something. Like, creative was like a niche that I could take and that it was one that was really valued by society. And, you know,

especially ever more so, like, with the information economy and all this, like, there were all these books kind of saying that creatives were going to inherit the world. And so I also, like, built a kind of identity around it in some way that I didn't even realize. It's interesting, you know, you mentioned the cultural value and, like, growing up being told you're creative as like the highest form of praise and like in my household, like my immigrant Arab household, that was not considered the highest form of praise by any means. It was like, I'm so glad you said that, you know? Yeah, say more. No, I mean, it just, it's, it was not the, the, the career path I have chosen would not have been the career path that my parents, I think, would have wanted. Partly because they were like, it's too outside the box, you know, like stick within the box.

Don't get too creative about your future, you know. Yeah, well, and for God's sake, don't become like an artist or something really impractical, you know yeah well and yeah and for for god's sake don't become like an artist or something really like impractical you know yeah no I do think that and I don't want to sort of over determine this or make too much of it because it's it's it's very complicated like if I say that only white middle class people care about creativity that's just wrong but it is true that like when we think of who the creative class is, it's tends to be white and middle class. And that's simply because it tends to be college educated people who have the generational messaging that creativity is something that they should pursue. And that is something

that, yeah, will make them happy and successful. And that's a messaging that came out of this Cold War moment where creativity was assumed to be a middle-class pursuit. When I originally started this project, I thought it was going to be like one chapter about the 50s and one chapter about the 60s and then the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. It was just going to be kind of like up until now. And I kind of got stuck in the 50s and 60s. But it's also because whenever I looked at something in the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc., it was kind of all felt like the same stuff. Or at least a lot of the same rationalizations for why we need to be paying

attention to creativity and what creativity is good for. I found it to be kind of more continuity than change. So the Cold War, the Russian threat starts to kind of decline. So there's less need to say, we're creative, we're Americans, and the Soviets are conformist. But then right about that moment in the late 70s and 80s, you have the rise of Japan and East Asia more generally. And so you kind of again have this nationalist racialized need to define what America has going for it in this post-industrial era. And again, that becomes creativity. So I think creativity then again kind of takes on this very American kind of American value. You also kind of have, in many ways, the world that the creativity champions of the 50s and 60s wanted to see kind of coming to be in some ways.

So they foresaw a post-industrial world. They were seeing the rise of this white-collar workforce, and they were kind of saying, like, this is the future. And so we need to reorient our values around this new class. So the values of the past were like loyalty and hard work and all this stuff. And that makes sense if you're working in a factory or if you're working in a stenography pool or something like that,

just like put your nose down and do it. But in this new world, which they were generally optimistic about and thought would kind of be a venue for human flourishing in a world that continued to be driven on knowledge, on research, on science, and less and less on manufacturing, that world kind of came to be, on research, on science, and less and less on manufacturing, that world kind of came to

be, not actually, but in a weird way where a lot of those manufacturing jobs got sent overseas or south of the border or got automated. And so that white-collar workforce does indeed become a greater and greater part of the economy. But the kind of bright side, the part that people want to pay attention to, is what gets termed the creative economy or the creative industries, all these people who are creating content and branding and marketing and messaging and design. So on Apple products, I'm talking to you on an Apple computer, and on the back, it says, made in China, designed in California. And that's a perfect encapsulation of this thing where it's like, okay, so we lost the manufacturing.

We lost that good blue-collar base that used to make us great and powerful. But what we got was design, designers. We still design things. We still invent things. We still do the quote-unquote creative work. So you still get that kind of racialized, nationalized Americanization of creativity, although creativity now has become this worldwide phenomenon. That's one thing. I think that the search for meaning in work is still a huge thing. The crisis of alienation was a big thing in the 50s and 60s, and I think we're still dealing with that today, even though we've supposedly had this kind of entrepreneurial era. I think a lot of people are still feeling really stuck in work and looking for meaning in work.

And so I think we're still trying to solve that problem through creativity. In the last few months, we've seen a real fear and upheaval around AI. Things like ChatGPT and DALI, which can create images and narratives, are taking over the jobs that the cult of creativity in some ways promised to protect. So we asked Sam, what happens to the cult of creativity in the age of AI? For decades, we were told that creativity was the thing, was the human attribute. There was an exhibition in the 80s sponsored by Chevron called Creativity, the Human Resource. So it's always been defined against what machines can do. And it's weird now and disorienting that we can see that a lot of the things that we call creative can be done by machines.

Now, to be fair, people have been saying this for a long time. There's a creativity researcher named Margaret Bowden. She's a leader in the field, she's been theorizing that theoretically, if your definition of creativity is the ability to come up with something new and valuable, that there's no reason that a computer couldn't do that. Nonetheless, I think in the larger discourse, we have equated creativity with humanness and humanity. So it's very disorienting for us to see this moment where, yeah, ChatGPT can write ad copy or write an article and Dali can create the cover of a book. And that's creative stuff that was supposed to not be able to be automated. What's interesting is that there's kind of a few responses to this.

One is hand-wringing to say, like, oh no, what is this going to do? Some people are actually just worried about the jobs of quote-unquote creative people. And that's totally fair. Like, this will eliminate jobs indirectly and passively for lots of people who otherwise had to spend hours and were able to bill lots of hours, yeah, writing copy, coming up with designs, stuff like that. That's a labor issue. But oftentimes what also gets kind of thrown into this is like, oh no, what's happening to creativity in this larger sense? So you'll see a headline like, what is AI doing to creativity? The case studies are about the jobs of artists,

but the idea is that there's something larger here at stake, which is creativity writ large, some kind of larger human ability, again, that can be applied to almost anything. And there, the threat seems to be more kind of philosophical, more about like what makes us human and less about the jobs of artists. So there's a part of this that I'm struggling with and to understand honestly on multiple levels, which is that AI is presenting us with this problem of what is intrinsic human creativity.

What is that thing that makes a song a song? I'm a musician myself. I write music for the show. I've done most of my adult life. It's been my profession to make things for a living. And I have to believe on to some extent that there is something intrinsic in us as these organic beings we call humans, that we create things and other people consume them and they can tell us authentic and good. AI is challenging that. And you kind of say that there is no, and tell me if I'm wrong

here, but the way I understand your argument is there isn't a kind of intrinsic value of creativity. And so I'm trying to understand that. What do you exactly mean by that? Because I naturally believe that there has to be some kind of intrinsic human value to creativity. I think according to the definition that most creativity specialists use, which is the ability to come up with something new and useful or appropriate, absolutely computers can be creative. I think creativity has been defined as a human trait, but I think it can so easily be wrested from us. We're all on some level just recombining things, no matter what we're doing. But when we're being creative, we are taking things and ideas that

we've seen in the past and we're recombining them, we're altering them a little bit, we're doing things to them, doing certain kinds of operations to them, and we're creating something that's new. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone who's ever theorized creativity has not denied that. Nobody thinks that you can come up with something completely new. The question, I guess, would be, is that all art is? And so, yeah, AI can be totally creative if your only criteria is that it's new and appropriate. But if your criteria is, is it good? Is it interesting? Does it say something important? Is it, I don't know, you know, are its politics good? Is its kind of vision of humanity good? Is it telling me something about the human experience? All of those things are things that I don't think AI in its current form can do. like writing a song or making a piece of art, running your household requires creativity. Survival requires creativity. And that there are manifestations of that, which we pay for,

which there's a kind of consumer element to, which is largely where our conversation is in. But that there is something that is very intrinsic and natural in all of us, in our ability to respond to our surroundings, to our circumstances in a, what we call creative way. So that can be manipulated and that can be kind of taken into this realm, I think the area we're talking about, but I do think that there has to be something that's fundamental there. So yeah, I think what's powerful about knowing its recent history and its particular history is that it helps us not be so confused and tormented by this

concept of creativity. So we all feel like we should be creative. We want to be creative. We will buy books about how to be more creative and stuff. But we all feel like a little bit conflicted about it, I think. We have these ideas that it's somehow been commodified or co-opted. And that if we could get back to some pure sense of what it means to be creative, we could maybe worm our way out of this conundrum. But what I realized is, doing this research, that creativity has always meant all these things. It was the whole idea that we are and should be creative was completely tied up

with an economic system that demanded of us novelty and demanded of us constant reinvention and flexibility and all this stuff that is super useful to staying afloat in the maelstrom of late capitalism, but isn't always necessarily the way to, you know, health and happiness. And so I think there are other values that we could try to extricate from it. So if we're really into art, is it because art's new and novel and innovative? Or is it because we think it's good for communicating or because we think beauty is important? Or maybe we're into art actually because of tradition rather than because of novelty. And so when you see it all under the umbrella of creativity, it allows us to kind of too easily naturalize the drive for novelty and innovation that has always

been part of its equation. I've been waiting to ask this, but okay, so what does a post-creativity world look like? Like, how do we deprogram ourselves from the way things are right now, right? Like, you've laid out an argument for a kind of a world in which there's this tension between creativity, the role it plays in our lives on multiple different levels, et cetera. What could a world beyond this current paradigm look like? If we can just kind of disentangle some of the things that creativity tangles together in our mind, we might feel something freeing in that. I think one of the things that creativity does is it makes every new thing into an equivalent

product of creativity. And that has the effect of taking away our ability to ask ourselves what should be created and what should not be created. And so I think maybe a world after this can be more upfront and more able to actually ask, what should we be inventing? What should we be creating? You know, should the content of the art matter? Should the effects of the technologies matter? And I think AI right now is giving us a very good example that like, yes, just making stuff for its own sake, because it seems fun and it's possible is not a good excuse to just make stuff. We should probably be asking ourselves what for? What should we be making as a society and as individuals?

I think we'll be able to be more deliberate about those kind of conversations. And I think that we might also, it might also make some room, if we dial back the creativity stuff a little bit, it might make some room for some other ways of being human to become valuable in our eyes. That was Sam Franklin, author of The Cult of Creativity, a surprisingly recent history, talking with us about the past, present, and future of our obsession with creativity. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner. Christina Kim.

Devin Katayama. Sasha Crawford-Holland. Amir Marashi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Also thanks to Johannes Dergi and Anya Gremend. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon and Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Anya Mizani.

Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at Thanks for listening. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose.

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