Presenter: Steven Potaczek

The creative workforce is facing unprecedented disruption. Generative AI tools are flooding the marketplace at unprecedented speed, producing music, art, design, and text in limitless supply. A recent article from the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a stark warning that current developments have “raised the prospect of the emergence not just of a radically new art movement but of the end of art itself—and especially of the artist as individual human genius.” Many creatives are afraid and desperately looking for assurance in this volatile new era.

This presentation argues that the perceived danger is built on a misunderstanding of both creativity and human psychology. Drawing on historical patterns of disruption along with emerging empirical research, the talk demonstrates why generative AI holds no substantive prospect of replacing human creativity. Far from a sentimental defense of the past, this argument rests on rigorous definitions of art, an examination of how creative value is produced, and evidence that every major technological shift has ultimately expanded rather than extinguished human artistic expression.

Participants will leave with a renewed understanding of their creative worth, grounded not in resistance to technology but in the irreducible qualities of the human imagination and experience. The goal is not reassurance for its own sake, but clarity about why creative people—made in the imago dei—remain indispensable in the age of AI.