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Will AI Have a Creative Voice by 2035? What Scientists Disagree About
Cognitive scientists and AI researchers genuinely disagree on AI creativity 2035 — what that debate means for children's creative development and which skills still matter.
A child in 2024 who wanted to illustrate their original story needed months of drawing practice. A child in 2026 can generate professional-quality illustrations from a text prompt in seconds. By 2035, that same child will have access to AI tools that can compose music, write publishable prose, design buildings, and generate scientific hypotheses — all from a conversational prompt.
The question parents keep asking, in slightly different forms, is: if AI can do all that, does my child’s creative voice in 2035 still matter? And underneath that question is a deeper one that cognitive scientists and AI researchers are actively arguing about: is AI creativity genuine, or is it an extremely convincing illusion built from everything humans have ever made?
That disagreement — not one side winning — is what actually matters for how you think about raising a creative child today.
The Case That AI Creativity Is Genuine (And Getting More So)
Researchers at Google Brain and DeepMind have published work arguing that modern AI systems do more than interpolate from training data — they exhibit something that looks structurally similar to human creative recombination. A 2023 paper in Nature by Google DeepMind’s AlphaCode team demonstrated that their model could solve competitive programming problems it had never seen — not by retrieving similar solutions, but by composing novel approaches.1
Stanford HAI researchers studying large language models have documented “emergent” capabilities — behaviors that weren’t explicitly trained and that scale nonlinearly with model size.2 Some of these emergent capabilities look like analogical reasoning, which is one cognitive mechanism behind human creativity.
The philosopher of mind Margaret Boden, who has studied computational creativity for decades, distinguishes three types: “combinational creativity” (combining existing ideas in new ways), “exploratory creativity” (finding new solutions within an existing space), and “transformational creativity” (redefining the space itself).3 Her analysis suggests current AI systems are doing genuine combinational and exploratory creativity. Whether they’ll reach transformational creativity — the kind that changes the rules — is what she, and most researchers, consider an open question.
The challenge for skeptics is that AI-generated work is increasingly indistinguishable from human creative work in controlled studies. A 2023 experiment at the University of Montana gave human judges samples of AI-generated and human-generated short stories and poetry. The judges couldn’t reliably distinguish them — and consistently rated AI-generated work as “more creative” in several categories.4
The Case That AI Creativity Is Sophisticated Remixing
The skeptical position, held by cognitive scientists including Gary Marcus and linguist Noam Chomsky, is that what looks like AI creativity is something structurally different: high-dimensional pattern interpolation over a massive training corpus. AI hasn’t created anything; it’s recombining what humans created.5
The most concrete version of this argument: ask an AI system to generate a genuinely original concept — something with no precedent in human cultural output — and it can’t. It can combine and restyle existing ideas with extraordinary fluency. It cannot originate from lived experience, embodied emotion, or the specific suffering and joy that makes human creative work meaningful.
A physicist who survived a war writes poetry differently than one who didn’t. An artist processing grief creates differently than one processing celebration. The source of that difference — experience, memory, mortality — is unavailable to any AI system. Whether that makes AI creativity “not real” or just “different” is genuinely contested among philosophers and cognitive scientists.
There’s also a practical concern: AI creative systems are trained on existing human work. They’re, in a meaningful sense, extracting and recombining from an enormous library of human creativity without the labor of originating it. What happens to creative diversity — the ecosystem of human cultural production — when the floor of creative quality drops to zero cost and the ceiling of AI output is already quite high?
What Changes When AI Produces Unlimited Content on Demand
Regardless of where you stand on the philosophical question, the practical changes are undeniable and significant:
The barrier to starting drops to zero. Any child who has ever said “I can’t draw” or “I’m not a good writer” can now get help starting. This is genuinely useful — creative work is often blocked not by lack of ability but by the activation energy of starting. AI lowers that cost dramatically.
The signal value of craft changes. When AI can produce technically proficient writing, music, and art effortlessly, what distinguishes human work? The answer converging among artists, educators, and researchers: authenticity, specificity, and original perspective. The AI can write a story; only you can write your story. The craft gap narrows; the voice gap widens.
Children growing up in this environment need a different creative education. The traditional model — teach technique, then apply it — worked when technique was the barrier to creative expression. The new barrier is identity: do you have something original to say? Do you have a specific perspective, formed from specific experience, that makes your creative work worth paying attention to? Building that sense of creative identity requires much more self-reflection, lived experience, and tolerance for vulnerability than technique training ever did.
Creative Skills AI Will Expand vs. Displace by 2035
| Creative domain | What AI expands | What AI displaces or competes with | What remains distinctly human |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visual art | Access to image generation; rapid ideation | Stock illustration, commercial design, generic visual content | Original artistic vision rooted in specific experience |
| Writing | First-draft generation, editing, stylistic variation | Formulaic content, basic copywriting, templates | Voice, argument, authentic narrative |
| Music | Melody generation, arrangement, production | Background music, simple compositions | Performance, emotion, cultural rootedness |
| Game and product design | Rapid prototyping, variation generation | Routine UI work, basic game assets | Systems thinking, player psychology, narrative design |
| Scientific hypothesis | Pattern recognition, literature synthesis | Routine literature reviews | Original research questions, experimental design |
| Storytelling for children | Plot variation, illustration | Generic children’s content | Emotionally specific stories that reflect real family experience |
The research from Stanford HAI suggests the skills that will compound in value as AI creativity improves are: having something genuine and specific to say, being able to direct and evaluate AI outputs with taste and judgment, and building creative perspective through real-world experience.6
What This Means for Raising a Creative Child
Encourage Specificity Over Quantity
The most important creative habit in an AI-saturated world is not generating more — AI can generate infinitely. It’s generating specifically. When your child makes something, the question to ask isn’t “is this good?” but “is this yours? What makes this distinctly from you?” A child who learns early that their specific perspective is their most valuable creative asset will be better equipped than one optimized to produce fluent, generic content.
Build Real Experiences That Feed Creative Work
AI systems don’t have childhoods, losses, friendships, failures, or moments of unexpected joy. Children do. Those experiences are the raw material for creative work that is genuinely unreplicable. Parents who want their children to have strong creative voices are investing in experiences — travel, nature, diverse friendships, difficult books, real responsibilities — not in creative skill apps.
For more on this, see our piece on AI and kids’ creativity — does it hurt development?
Teach Them to Direct AI, Not Just Use It
A child who can prompt AI to generate something, then evaluate whether it’s any good and why, and then push it in a specific direction — is developing creative direction skills. These are the skills of an art director, a film director, a creative lead — someone who has taste and judgment and can deploy tools toward a specific vision. That’s very different from a child who just uses AI to do their creative homework for them.
See our article on AI image generators and kids’ creativity research for practical guidance on this distinction.
Don’t Be Too Quick to Smooth Difficulty
AI lowers the effort of creative work. That’s genuinely useful sometimes. But the difficulty of creative work — the specific frustration of not being able to get what’s in your head onto the page or canvas — is itself developmentally important. It builds persistence, the capacity for self-criticism, and the resilience to make something imperfect and put it in front of an audience anyway.
Parents who always help children use AI to smooth over creative friction may inadvertently be protecting their kids from the exact experience that builds creative muscle. Some friction is the point.
For building the underlying mindset, see our guide on future-proofing kids’ career and AI skills.
Expose Them to Human Creative Work That Moves Them
Counterintuitively, the best preparation for creative life in an AI-saturated world may be deep exposure to human creative work — not tutorials, not how-to guides, but actual novels, films, paintings, and music that hit something real. Children who have strong aesthetic taste — who know what moves them and why — are better equipped to evaluate the torrent of AI-generated content and to understand what makes creative work worth making.
What to Watch For Over the Next 3 Months
Month 1: Notice whether your child’s creative projects are getting more generic or more specific. If they’re using AI tools, are the outputs indistinguishable from anything anyone else might produce? That’s a signal to push for more personal perspective.
Month 2: Does your child have a sense of what they’re trying to say with their creative work? Or are they just trying to produce something that looks good? The identity question — “what do I uniquely have to say?” — is the one to start nurturing.
Month 3: When they make something they’re proud of, ask what makes it theirs. Not as a test — as a genuine conversation about voice and specificity. Children who can answer that question are developing the creative identity that will matter most as AI-generated content becomes universal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AI art “real” art? How do I explain this to my kid?
There’s no scientific consensus — and that’s the honest answer for your kid too. AI-generated art is technically impressive and aesthetically interesting. Whether it’s “real” art in the sense of expressing genuine human experience is a philosophical question. What matters for your child: making something that is genuinely theirs is different from generating something that is plausibly good.
Should my child still learn to draw/write/play music if AI can do it?
Yes. Learning to draw builds spatial reasoning and attention. Learning to write builds logical argumentation. Learning music builds pattern recognition and persistence. These skills have benefits beyond the output they produce. And the human who has learned the craft has taste and judgment that the person who just prompts AI doesn’t develop.
Will AI replace children’s book illustrators and authors by 2035?
AI will almost certainly displace some commercial illustration and generic content writing. But children’s books that resonate — that feel like a specific human made something specifically for children — have a different value proposition. The emotionally specific, the weird, the personal are harder for AI to replicate convincingly. Whether the market rewards that distinctness is a separate question.
My child uses AI for all their creative homework. Should I stop this?
It depends on the type of creative work. Using AI to generate the first draft of a story they then substantially revise and make their own is different from submitting AI output as their work. The habit of using AI outputs as raw material to improve, not as finished product to submit, is the distinction worth building.
About the author
Ricky Flores is the founder of HiWave Makers and an electrical engineer with 15+ years of experience building consumer technology at Apple, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. He writes about how kids learn to build, think, and create in a tech-saturated world. Read more at hiwavemakers.com.
Sources
- Li, Y., et al. (2022). “Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode.” Science, 378(6624), 1092–1097. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abq1158
- Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024. https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/
- Boden, M.A. (2004). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Köbis, N., & Mossink, L.D. (2023). “Artificial Intelligence Versus Maya Angelou: Experimental Evidence That People Cannot Differentiate AI-Generated From Human-Written Poetry.” Computers in Human Behavior, 143, 107448.
- Marcus, G., & Davis, E. (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. Pantheon.
- Giannini, S., & Muñoz, P.S. (2023). Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386693
- Runco, M.A., & Jaeger, G.J. (2012). “The Standard Definition of Creativity.” Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.650092
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