Creativity of one, powered by the many

In a recent workshop, I posed a simple question to the participants: What does creativity mean to you? The responses were as varied as the attendees themselves. Some spoke of originality. Others of courage. A few mentioned ‘discomfort’. That diversity is instructive. Creativity is rarely a solitary spark. More often, it is the visible surface of a layered inheritance, made personal through judgment, craft, and risk.

Margaret Boden classifies creativity into three kinds: exploratory, combinational, and transformational. Exploratory creativity works within a given framework. Combinational creativity fuses existing ideas in novel ways. Transformational creativity alters the framework itself.

Theory, however, rarely lives in abstraction. It finds expression in people, in rooms, in conversations. My summers were spent in Narayanaguda, Hyderabad. The street opposite Deepak Mahal Talkies was, in those years, a quiet crucible of artistic exchange. Artists, writers, and filmmakers gathered at my grandfather’s house to assemble, argue, and refine their styles. Thota Vaikuntam was among them. I watched his work evolve gradually, the forms becoming bolder, the faces more stylised, the colours more assured. Creativity was never solitary. It was shaped in conversation, in disagreement, in shared tea, and in long afternoons of debate.

In Vaikuntam’s work, one sees exploratory and combinational creativity at play. Consider his works alongside those of his contemporary, Laxma Goud. Both were influenced by their teacher, KG Subramanyan, affectionately known as Mani Da. Subramanyan did not impose a style; he cultivated a sensibility. He encouraged his students to explore and combine folk idioms, everyday life, and indigenous craft traditions, while remaining intellectually alert to global modernist movements.

Vaikuntam’s bold, stylised figures rooted in Telangana village life are a distilled cultural memory. Goud’s etchings, often intimate and sensual, carry the imprint of rural Andhra. Both artists are unmistakably individual, shaped by lived experience. Yet their individuality was amplified by a shared teacher, shared traditions, and sustained artistic dialogue. The individual voice emerged from collective inheritance, and the common influence is noticeable.

If Subramanyan exemplifies the nurturing of plural voices, Wassily Kandinsky exemplifies transformation. In 1913, Kandinsky pushed painting beyond representation, arguing that colour and form could evoke emotion independent of objects. This was not merely a new style. It was a new grammar. Depiction was now an experience.

Transformation, however, is not confined to art. In engineering, the TRIZ methodology, derived from analysing hundreds of thousands of patents, challenges the myth of solitary genius. It studies patterns across inventions and extracts principles that can be recombined to resolve new contradictions. TRIZ is combinational creativity made systematic. It draws upon accumulated insight to empower individual problem-solving.

The role of the machine

Where, then, does AI fit into this landscape? AI systems today are trained on vast corpora of human expression. They synthesise what humanity has already achieved, suggesting compositions, styles, and references at a new scale. In that sense, AI is a compressed archive of collective expression, rendered usable on demand.

But synthesis is not the same as experience. In the workshop, I urged participants to begin not with an admired emotion, but with one they had felt. Sit with that feeling until it becomes uncomfortable. Use AI to explore possible forms of expression and then remove the machine when making the final choices. Decide what stays and what is discarded. Let imperfection remain.

AI may know every painter who came before you. It may generate a convincing echo of their voice. But the stroke of the brush must still tremble in your hand. The responsibility of meaning cannot be delegated. Creativity in the next age will continue to use technology, including AI, but it need not surrender to it. AI can amplify exploratory and combinational creativity by widening access to references and accelerating iteration. Transformational creativity, however, often demands lived tension, moral choice, and emotional risk. Subramanyan, Vaikuntam, and Goud show that originality is rarely born in isolation. Kandinsky reminds us that frameworks can be reimagined. TRIZ teaches us that patterns can be mined and recombined.

AI now offers us the accumulated work of civilisation in an accessible form. Yet the emotion must still be ours.

Do not outsource your feelings. Let the machine synthesise. Let it show you the history you inherit. But bring your own doubt, your own joy, and your own unfinished grief. Only then does the work begin to live.

The writer is the former CTO of Tata Group and founder of AI company Myelin Foundry is driven to peel off known facts to discover unknown layers.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).