Vince Buyssens

Stop asking if AI can be creative. Start asking who will teach it. Last week, Permeke, a local library here in Belgium, celebrated its 20th birthday, and this is the manifesto I shared. For two decades, this library's shelves, and the people who tend them, taught the many cultures of Antwerp how to read, debate, and dream. Now, with AI, a new type of library has arrived, a silicon Babel built from almost everything humanity has ever written, painted, or sung. Yet, what are most of us doing with this genuinely novel cultural artifact? Flooding the internet with Ghiblified profile pictures and LinkedIn AI slop; beige averages that flatter nobody. That blandness isn’t a bug; it’s mathematics. A model trained on everything and tuned for everyone will orbit the statistical middle, the cultural equivalent of slice of white bread. And the very people most able to drag the model out of the median—writers, poets, philosophers, sociologists—stand aside, arms folded, as John David Pressman articulated so well. Yes, their work was scraped without consent. Yes, disruption sucks. But who is actually buying AI books, music, or movies? No one. John Keat’s prose still moves people, and films like Sinners still fill theatres. I’d argue that true, human artistry is thriving more than ever. So no, AI isn’t threatening art or culture; it’s threatening average (thank god for that!). And when the middle gets automated, the edge becomes the north star. The poets, critics, philosophers, and librarians aren’t just safe; I genuinely believe they’re holding the only reliable compass. Their years spent interpreting subtext and exploring subcultures have prepared them better than anyone to steer through a model’s latent space, where every idea is a coordinate, and every coordinate is only a short vector-walk from another. The machine can march forever. What it severely lacks is a guide who knows why a leap matters and where to land. So, my plea to everyone in the liberal arts and humanities: take the wheel and test the coordinates yourself. Walk a verse through rival theologies, pilot a treaty draft through propaganda cross-winds, or march a medieval jester straight into TikTok irony. The farther you roam, the less the model echoes culture and the more it reveals new pathways. Don’t just start prompting. Pick up the compass. Show the machine where wonder lives.