Creative MASS: Re-Worlding Post-AI Creativity

This article examines the evolving discourse of creativity drawing from a comparative literature analysis across art education and computer science research in artificial intelligence (AI). We trace how creativity is conceptualized differently within these fields: as an embodied, culturally situated process in art education, and as a quantifiable, solvable question in AI research. As a counterpoint that frames generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as creative, we recast GenAI as a massive abstract statistical system (MASS) to shift discourse away from misleading anthropomorphisms of AI, emphasizing the system’s statistical logic and infrastructural implications. We argue that MASS computing reconfigures creativity into a continuum of human–machine agency, moving from intuitive and situated practices to data-driven processes shaped by statistical modeling and computational abstraction. Through this lens, creativity is not only redefined but re-worlded, opening new pedagogical and theoretical pathways for understanding the intersection of art, technology, and society in a post-AI era.