Creative Reckoning: Co-Creating Presence With AI
When the music no longer needs us, memory, wonder, and human creativity become the cognitive and spiritual technologies that guide innovation forward.
On Easter morning, my cousin texted me a photo from his security cam. Just an ordinary image of a newly painted porch back home in southeastern Kentucky. Our great-grandpap built the house by hand over a hundred years ago, on a one-lane dirt road by a creek. Our granny was born there. Generations of our family have gathered there to face hard things, celebrate good ones, and just sit together. My response to my cousin was this:
I hope that coat of paint ends up poking through the holes of many more to come on top of it as the years go by and more of our family lend their own stories and colors to that special place.
Growing up, an old glider rocker used to sit on the porch. Painted many times over the years, as a kid I would spend hours examining the little rainbows of imperfection in the chipped paint around its edges. The layers of faded and cracked color always sparked wonder. Who painted them? What was happening in their lives that day? That chipped paint didn’t just weather; it remembered. It was a creative record. Layered, lived, and alive with memory.
Later in the morning, I watched a video of my mother singing in an Easter play at our family church. She died from an aggressive form of brain cancer less than a year after that recording. Hearing her voice again was deeply spiritual, connecting and disorienting at once. I didn’t want to find my bearings though. I wanted to stay tangled in her creativity.
Old paint. A voice on a scratchy video. These moments don’t fit neatly into language, but they shape how we locate ourselves in time. They’re a kind of living creativity activated by memory.
I felt something similar this morning reading a Popular Mechanics article titled: A Musician’s Brain Matter Is Still Making Music—Three Years After His Death.
It explored an installation called Revivification, where living brain cells from late composer Alvin Lucier were used to generate new music. Artists and scientists collaborated to explore whether creativity could persist beyond life.
The question wasn’t can machines create? It was what does it mean when creativity survives its maker, but in a form no longer tethered to human agency?
AI raises similar questions.
I share Reid Hoffman's view that we are in the early part of a cognitive industrial revolution, and AI's potential is extraordinary. But realizing that potential depends on the human side of the equation and what we choose to build into the technology and what we choose to leave out.
This moment demands not creative rejection, but creative reckoning.
Reverence for potential shouldn’t eclipse reflection. The real opportunity isn’t just output. It’s presence. To fully harness AI’s promise, we need to confront what it unsettles within us.
I’m evolving toward the belief that generative AI unsettles us because it is simultaneously all of us and no one in particular. It reflects us without remembering us. It strips away the sacrifice of time and soul. The feeling that something finite was given up to make something meaningful.
When models trained on stolen poems, stories, and songs generate endless outputs without sleep, doubt, or sacrifice, they flatten the human cost of creating. They produce without presence. When “creative” output no longer requires a living being, at least not in the traditional sense, we’re forced to confront the idea that creativity might outlive us in ways that no longer need us to be present.
In this way, generative AI touches the nerve of what the ancients called the third death: the moment when your name is spoken for the last time. The first two deaths we expect. The body goes. The social ties dissolve. But the third death is about memory, meaning, and legacy.
When machines simulate creativity without knowing loss, they risk severing the thread that ties creation to remembrance. If a poem can exist without a poet, what happens to the poet’s name? Their story? Their chipped-paint legacy? For many, this is the unspoken grief beneath the AI debate: not just being replaced, but being forgotten. Not just being outpaced, but erased.
Subconsciously, AI causes us to reckon with our own impermanence. It makes us question whether the stories we carry (our chipped-paint layers of effort, grief, and wonder), can still matter in a world where creative content is infinite but no longer tethered to the beating hearts and messy lives that fused meaning deep inside it.
That’s why artist-led technology matters. Artists understand memory as more than data. Neuroscience confirms: memory is dynamic, reconstructive, and core to meaning-making. Memory is how we make identity, find belonging, and connect across time.
We can architect AI systems around that.
This isn’t about nostalgia and longing for the past. It’s about designing systems that treat memory as a living, creative force. We can use this as scaffolding for building future AI systems that respect the emotional, cognitive, and cultural layers of memory.
That might look like models designed to surface forgotten voices instead of optimizing attention capture. Interfaces could value ambiguity and context over compression and speed. Some models might reflect narrative continuity, honoring not just the content of memory, but its structure as lived by people across time.
For example, think about the difference between music playlists and life soundtracks. Most apps today save your favorite songs in a playlist—a list of isolated tracks. But memory doesn’t work like that. It weaves meaning across time, stitching together emotions, contexts, and stories into something living.
Imagine a system that remembers not just the songs you loved, but when and why you loved them: the summer you graduated, the winter you moved cities, the moment you fell in love. They’re emotional and psychological threads, woven into the soundtrack of your life.
It’s not just about collecting songs. It’s about honoring how music becomes part of your story across time. That’s the difference between storing content and preserving the structure of memory.
Repair isn’t just about looking back. It becomes a creative reckoning that restores continuity between past, present, and future in the systems we build. When artists and industry co-create technology with this in mind, they don’t just heal what’s been stolen. They offer a new architecture for remembering. One that technology alone can’t invent, but that future creativity depends on in all its forms.
Integrating arts, science, and business is essential.
The toughest questions we’ll face in the age of AI likely won’t be technological. They will be human.
For business leaders, this has practical stakes. As AI changes how we work, emotional and spiritual depth becomes strategic. More than inspiration, creativity is a product of human tension, loss, and longing.
Innovation teams don’t just need skills. They need stories that people can believe in.
Because beneath the surface of investor pitch decks, startup spreadsheets, and “on-brand” messaging, we are all just people:
People trying to move through innovation grief and personal loss while under the pressure of continuous organizational growth.
People integrating artificial intelligence into our personal lives and professional dreams even as we wrestle with its unknowns.
People who know the feeling of sacrificing parts of ourselves for validation from investors, markets, and the digital void.
People whose success can sometimes leave us feeling complicit in stifling the social ecosystems that sustain meaningful and purpose-rich lives.
The Challenge Ahead
What if we brought more of our human-side struggles, secrets, and salvation notes—as artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists—into the light? Transformational creativity depends on these frictions to become innovation.
Our challenge isn’t keeping pace with AI. It’s shaping it. That means expanding the story of innovation to include the full human experience of exploration and discovery: hope, belonging, compassion, courage, trust, freedom, heartbreak, and joy. These aren’t side effects of creativity. They are elemental to the creative tension and friction needed for the process of creativity to operate fully.
Creativity and culture have always evolved together. But AI shifts the frame and causes us to interrogate meaning in new ways. It asks: What is creativity, really? And what do we want it to mean now?
I’m hopeful about the future of human-AI co-creation. There can be phenomenal things ahead if we invest intention towards architecting systems that preserve presence.
If we get this right, AI won’t replace the artist. It will remind us why we ever needed art in the first place.
This is our creative reckoning: not that art no longer needs us, but that we now decide what being needed means.
Creativity lives not only in what the living carry forward, but in what those who came before us leave behind for us to find and feel.
Chipped paint. A voice in a church. A porch that still holds the weight of those who sat there long ago.
These aren’t just memories. They’re evidence that presence isn’t limited to the present. The story of innovation sometimes rings most true in the ancestral wisdom of the past. Resides most meaningfully within future history. Finds purposeful shelter in the possibilities of the infinite present.
And maybe, maybe, AI is our big chance to make the work of creativity and innovation more human than ever.
In the age of AI, leading innovation requires more than creating something new. Successful innovators lead with wonder. They do not just build human-centered products. They follow human-driven discovery.
Sometimes that discovery emerges through technology. But more often, it begins in places that hold presence. Places that shape the questions we ask before technology helps us find answers.
An old front porch in rural Kentucky.
A song coming from a scratchy video filmed in an Appalachian church.
Liminal spaces where chipped paint and memory remind us that creativity is layered, imperfect, and deeply alive.
My Other Places, Other Frames
Culture Futurist Substack: Business, Innovation & Future of Work
Poetry Substack: Culture Kudzu: Poetry for Entrepreneurs -
Professional: Creativity America
Personal: Culture Futurist
Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation®
©2021-2025 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. This article contains proprietary intellectual property. Reproduction, distribution, or adaptation, in whole or in part, requires accurate attribution. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any affiliated organization or institution.
Always interesting to have an insight into your mind Theo. Thanks for sharing so much with the world.