CONCEPT
Creative Groundlessness
The dissolution of the assumption that the creative self is the origin of the creative work—the recognition, acute in human-AI
collaboration, that the work emerges from a space between minds rather than from a single mind, and that the space cannot be owned.
Creative groundlessness is the specific form of the open ground that human-AI collaboration produces in anyone whose identity has been organized around creative authorship. When a builder working with an AI tool finds that the tool makes a connection she had not made, draws a parallel she had not considered, changes the direction of an argument she thought was hers—the solid ground of 'I made this' shifts to the
groundless space of 'this emerged from a collaboration I cannot fully map.' The work does not become worse. Often it becomes better. But the stable, located creator who seemed to be the origin of the work dissolves under examination into a participant in a process rather than its source—and from that groundless space, the existential question rises: if the work does not originate in me, then who am I?
Pema Chödrön's contemplative framework names this dissolution as a form of
shenpa—not a