Mirrors with Memory

Reimagining Creativity in the Age of AI

Imagine a world where your reflection is not your own - where technology can sculpt your image, mimic your voice, inhabit your persona with such precision that the line between real and artificial becomes a whisper-thin membrane.

Strangely, my face has always been a canvas of borrowed identity. For years, strangers have insisted I'm a doppelgänger of Tom Cruise - a living, breathing echo of a Hollywood icon. Nearly everyday, someone will point out this look-alike birthmark on my face. If it’s weird to you, trust me, it’s much weirder for me.

But this experience has given me a unique perspective on the intersection of perception, performance, and authenticity. Beneath this surface-level resemblance lies a deeper inquiry: who are we when technology can render us infinitely malleable?

In 2020, my life changed when Chris Umé and I created the viral sensation DeepTomCruise. It became the most famous example of photorealistic synthetic video, leaping over the uncanny valley so convincingly that it alerted the world to a new era of visual Artificial Intelligence. No one had seen anything like it before. But everyone knew that face.

What was most personally satisfying about that series of videos was their humor - a human quality not often associated with AI. Laughter is a pure emotion. We know instantly when it’s forced. Yet our videos made billions of people laugh. Why? Because this new generative technology was in service to human creativity.

Chris and I, along with many others, went on to build Metaphysic, an award-winning AI-powered studio working across film, television, music, advertising, and live entertainment. Over the past four years, I’ve had a front-row seat to the extraordinary ways AI is reshaping artistic creation. The technology is new, but the creative impulse is ancient.

As Metaphysic enters a new chapter as Brahma AI, I’ve been reflecting on patterns that have emerged across artistic disciplines. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme - technology has always played a role in artistic expression. The question isn’t whether AI will shape art, but how it will shape us.

Art as the Offspring of Technique

Art has never existed in a vacuum. It has always evolved in tandem with the tools available to its creators. From spoken language to the written word, from cave drawings to oil painting, from quills to word processors - each technological leap has expanded humanity’s ability to tell stories and express emotion. Each technological breakthrough was met with resistance. Each time, the critics proclaimed the death of "true" art. Each time, they were spectacularly wrong.

Artists often define themselves by their chosen medium - whether with words, paint, performance, or code - but these are merely instruments, extensions of human intelligence. At its core, creativity remains the driving force, transcending the tools used to manifest it. The advent of AI is no different.

Technologies that have made art easier to produce have never stifled creativity. Instead, they have broadened artistic possibilities. As we help design the new scaffolding for tomorrow’s artistic architecture, we must remember that every great work is built on a foundation of human imagination. While artificial intelligence continues to evolve the visual grammar of storytelling, the language of art will always be understood by human ears and eyes.

Moreover, art has always been artificial. The very word shares its roots with ars or artis, meaning skill, craftsmanship, or technique - art, by definition, is an act of deliberate creation. Again and again, technologies once dismissed as unnatural have instead liberated artistic expression. The following are just a few illustrative examples from the past two centuries that give context to the cycle of technology expanding the creative landscape and giving artists new ways to evoke meaning and emotion.

“Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no Impressionism.”
~Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Before John Goffe Rand created the metal paint tube in 1841, paints were limited in their portability and freshness. Prior to that moment, a great portion of painters’ work was in the preparation and mixing their own paints. The emerging movement of Impressionism was characterized by capturing light and color outdoors and this style was facilitated entirely by Rand’s new packaging technology. By securing individual colors of paint in tubes, artists were now allowed to work in “plein air,” using a wide range of vibrant, newly available pigments - chrome yellow and cobalt blue - crucial for the Impressionist style. A new style was born, a new technique flourished.

Where paint in tubes democratized painting and spawned Impressionism in the 19th century, paint in cans saw the rise of street art in the 1970s, leading to new generations of artists from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Keith Haring to Banksy. New canvasses, new audience, new meaning through new visual expression.

“I have captured light and arrested its flight. The sun itself shall draw my pictures.”
~Louis Daguerre

In the late 1830’s Louis Daguerre wrote to a friend about a profound breakthrough he’d made. By layering silver-plated copper sheets with iodine, exposing them in a camera and using mercury vapors with salt water, Daguerre had been able to preserve the likeness of a static scene as it appeared in nature. Some would say he created mirror with memory.

For much of the world, this was blasphemy. But to Daguerre, who identified as an artist as much as an entrepreneur, his early iteration of photography had advanced the visual language that creatives could articulate the human experience.

The effects were profound both artistically and in factual documentation. French painter Paul Delaroche, supposedly exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" after seeing a daguerreotype around 1840. Thankfully, he couldn’t have been more wrong - photography didn’t kill painting, and its digitization didn’t obviate the need for professional photographers.

It never ceases to amaze me that before the invention of the camera, the only way to capture one’s likeness was through the hands of an artist - each portrait or sculpture shaped by another’s creative interpretation. It is this human filter that makes art inherently subjective, infusing it with creative honesty. Technology may enhance artistic expression, but it is human intelligence that provides its depth, its context, and ultimately, its soul.

“I have just an ordinary voice. Anyone who can carry a tune thinks he can sing just as good as I do.”

~Bing Crosby

For centuries, actors and singers mastered the art of projection, learning to project their voices to the farthest corners of theaters and concert halls. The louder one could sing, the greater their reach - fame itself was often measured in decibels. Opera, with its booming arias, remains a lasting testament to this era of vocal performance.

The 1920s, however, brought a seismic shift. Advances in microphones and amplification reshaped not just the volume of music, but its very style. Bing Crosby, more than just a talented vocalist, recognized the microphone as more than a tool for loudness - it was an instrument for nuance. While others still belted to be heard, he embraced a softer, more intimate approach, shaping his phrasing with subtlety and ease. His smooth, conversational delivery - what became known as “crooning” - revolutionized the music industry, setting the stage for a new era of vocal performance. The ripple effects of this innovation are still felt today. One could draw a direct line from Bing Crosby’s Mary to Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy - what once seemed like technological artifice has become an integral creative tool.

As live performance venues and formats continue to evolve, new technologies do not erase the artistry of the past; they expand its possibilities. Electronic synthesizers didn’t render instrumentalists obsolete, just as Auto-Tune didn’t eliminate the need for vocal precision. Instead, these tools have broadened the spectrum of artistic expression, offering new ways to shape sound and style.

“It was almost a year from the time we started that we got a piece of film 100 feet long. A piece of film you could see on the screen in a minute.”

~Max Fleischer

Animation revolutionized early cinema, but its characters initially moved with a stiffness that betrayed their artificial origins. In 1915, Max Fleischer introduced rotoscoping, a painstaking technique that allowed artists to manually refine film footage frame by frame. Yet it wasn’t until the 1930s that Disney animators fully harnessed its potential, discovering that when combined with live performance, it could breathe unprecedented realism into animated storytelling.

Rather than sketching characters from imagination alone, animators filmed live-action sequences and projected them onto glass panels, meticulously tracing each movement to preserve the natural flow of motion. This breakthrough gave animated figures a newfound weight and fluidity, transforming them from exaggerated cartoons into living, expressive characters. Classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland captivated audiences worldwide - not just because of technological innovation, but because of the human performances at their core. Rotoscoping didn’t replace artistry; it enhanced it, bridging the gap between imagination and believability.

Generative AI and the Future of Creativity

Much of what made the internet so groundbreaking was how it democratized distribution. Before the digital age, gatekeepers - studio executives, publishers, editors - controlled who could share their work with the world. Then, a shift occurred. Suddenly, anyone could build an audience and publish their own work. YouTubers became more popular than late-night hosts.

Three decades later, however, the barriers to production have remained high. While anyone can distribute content, creating high-quality work still requires specialized skill, resources, and time. Generative AI is changing that. Artists now have tools that allow them to manifest their ideas faster and at an unprecedented scale.

We used to have to learn the language of creative tools. Now, the tools speak our language. With a simple text prompt, ideas materialize in seconds. The question is no longer how we make things, but what comes next?

History teaches us that we often fail to grasp the long-term consequences of new technology. As technologist and historian Roy Amara stated, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” After all, no one at the beginning of the printing press or the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring.

In 1780, the steam engine seemed like little more than a tool for pumping water out of coal mines. With hindsight, we recognize it as a transformative lever that decoupled economic growth from population growth, laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. In 1879, Edison’s light bulb looked like a mere improvement over whale-oil lamps. But in the grander scheme, the advent of electricity - both direct and alternating current - unleashed another revolution, powering not just light but heat, machinery, and an untold number of innovations that would shape the modern world.

How are we to grasp the moment on hand? We’d do well to remember that we’ve been here before. Many times, in fact. As the above examples in painting, photography, singing and motion-capture demonstrate, we will always use the latest tools on hand to express oneself, one’s point of view, one’s experience in life. This is the calling of any artist. The impulse to articulate life in the first person is central to the human experience. We revere those artists who do so with resonance.

Yet creativity isn’t just about what we say - it’s about how we say it. As the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts recently noted:

Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.

Art is not merely information; it is experience, emotion, and interpretation. In regards to something as silly as a young Tom Cruise on TikTok, artificial intelligence didn’t make you laugh. Chris Umé and I made you laugh. You noticed it because of technology. You felt something because of artistry.

Before dedicating myself to entrepreneurship, I spent years as a film and television actor. The real craft of acting isn’t in memorizing lines - it’s in making unexpected choices, in surprising the audience in a believable way, in eliciting an emotional response. That kind of artistic intuition cannot be automated.

What AI cannot replicate is the accumulation of lived experience. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have a childhood, never went on a first date, can’t remember bluffing through an oral exam. My "dataset" isn't a collection of algorithms, but a lifetime of moments: the loss of a sibling, the wonder of fatherhood, the vulnerability of an audition where everything hangs on a single, unexpected choice.

I recall an audition years ago where the script called for a moment of quiet desperation. The director didn't want lines - he wanted a breath, a micro-expression that would crack the scene open. No algorithm can manufacture that depth. No machine understands the language of human vulnerability.

We stand at the precipice of a new creative frontier. Artificial intelligence is not our replacement, but our most sophisticated mirror—reflecting our imagination, amplifying our potential, challenging us to reimagine what it means to create. The pixel may be generated, but the soul behind it remains gloriously, unpredictably human.

The pixel, once a dab of paint or ink, then silver on a plate, then a frame of film, continues to hold its contemporary magic. Today, it is rendered digitally on a screen. Tomorrow, it will be generated. And along with trillions of other generated pixels, it will weave tapestries and stories that articulate the imagination of a new generation.

What first appears artificial will, in time, reveal itself as just another instrument of human creativity, expanding the ways we see, feel, and create. And that art will be as “true” as ever.

Among the many excellent writers who helped this piece:

• Louis Anslow in The Pessimists Archive

• Clive James in The Meaning of Recognition

• Ted Gioia in The Honest Broker

• Tyler Cowen in Marginal Revolution

• Derek Thompson in The Atlantic

• Matthew B. Crawford in Hedgehog Review

• Justice John Roberts in The Supreme Court Year-End Report