Someone looked at a perfectly good dinner and thought it needed a soundtrack. Fair enough. Most restaurants get that far.
But then someone went further. What if the music and the food were designed together? What if each course was part of a performance, rather than something you ate while a playlist did its best to cover the noise from the kitchen?
There’s a cinematic dining experience coming to Manchester that does something similar with film. You watch Home Alone, and the courses arrive in sync with moments on screen. Someone has put a fair amount of thought into when you should receive your pizza.
I like the idea. But what’s more interesting is the journey of the thought process that got us there. A random collection of thoughts, experiences, interactions, dreams… whatever nouns you want to give them. How does human creativity go from A to B to purple?
That’s the bit of creativity I’ve been thinking about.
Head-on meets side-on
What is head-on creativity? Take French-Asian fusion food. You can broadly follow how that journey comes into being: I like French food, I like Asian food, what would happen if we smashed them together? It takes skill, but you can see the connection.
That’s what I call head-on creativity. You have a direction, some ingredients and a problem to work through. You explore combinations, make adjustments and find something that works.
That’s the kind of task I’d happily give an AI. Here are two culinary traditions. Find the overlaps. Suggest a menu. Now make it vegetarian. Now do it for half the budget.
Side-on creativity is different.
Side-on creativity is the thought that changes what you were trying to do in the first place.
You’re working on a meal and something from music, theatre or a half-remembered childhood experience interrupts the process. Suddenly, you’re thinking about whether dinner could have a narrative. Whether anticipation could be an ingredient. Whether the silence before a course could matter.
The connection might be explainable afterwards. That doesn’t tell you how someone arrived at it.
My belief is that this side-on creativity is uniquely human. And yes, I would bet my future on it.
Side-on creativity is uniquely human
I’m not suggesting every unusual pairing is a flash of human genius. Putting custard on a keyboard would be unusual. It would also be a waste of custard… and a keyboard for that matter.
What matters is the connection doing something useful. Changing the experience. Revealing a possibility. Solving a problem in a way that the original approach never allowed for.
That’s why this is as much about lateral thinking as it is about art or creative work. You’re trying to put together things that perhaps shouldn’t go together and then, voilà, the problem has a new solution.
Human and only humans have the unique ability to produce side-on creativity. We bring a lifetime of experiences into a problem, including things we don’t know we’re bringing. Frustrations, physical sensations, conversations, embarrassing mistakes. Something we saw years ago and haven’t consciously thought about since.
I think side-on creativity starts with those fragile moments of curiosity. Things that catch your attention before you know why, or what you might do with them. Ideas rarely arrive fully formed. We need to preserve their raw material and give it a chance to become something.
That belief is at the heart of Scrapebook, the product I’m building. Scrapebook is not preserving the past. It is preserving the raw material from which the future is made.
An AI can produce an unexpected answer. That alone doesn’t settle whether it has arrived there through the same kind of creative act.
The dinner example illustrates what I mean; it doesn’t prove human exclusivity. But the distinction between generating a surprising output and having that human moment of connection is where I’m placing my bet.
We’ve been trying to explain this for a while
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates describes poetic inspiration as a kind of divine possession. The poet produces something they can’t necessarily explain through knowledge or technique alone. A fairly dramatic explanation for “I don’t know where that came from”.
Kant’s account of artistic genius also makes room for work that can’t simply be reproduced by following instructions. Even the person who created it may be unable to explain how someone else could do the same. Awkward news for anyone selling a five-step process.
Nietzsche explored the relationship between form and restraint on one side, and intoxication and instinct on the other. His account of Greek tragedy gave both a role: the impulse and the form that allows it to become something.
Arthur Koestler’s bisociation gets particularly close to what I’m describing: bringing together frames of reference that we wouldn’t normally connect. He explored it across humour, scientific discovery and art.
None of these ideas settles a modern argument about AI. But they give us ways to describe a creative act whose workings aren’t always available to the person doing it.
You can explain the finished idea beautifully and still have no useful answer to, “How did you think of that?”
If that’s our advantage, what are we doing with it?
This is where the argument becomes practical.
If I’m right about side-on creativity, and I think we all know I am :), then our response to AI should include protecting the things that feed it. We should be taking our curiosity, experience and wandering attention seriously.
Instead, we seem determined to make every minute account for itself.
A walk becomes a podcast opportunity. A train journey becomes an inbox session. A conversation needs an agenda. Even our reading starts to look suspiciously like professional development.
We’re filling our heads, certainly. But often with more of the same things, chosen for their immediate relevance to the work already in front of us.
Where’s purple supposed to come from?
The book you picked up for no professional reason. The conversation with someone whose life is nothing like yours. The exhibition you didn’t understand but couldn’t stop thinking about. Those experiences give you something different to bring to a problem.
And the gaps give those experiences a chance to meet.
You can’t schedule the sideways bit
I’m wary of turning this into another productivity technique. Thirty minutes of strategic boredom, followed by a quick review of whether you’ve had enough original thoughts.
That sounds exhausting.
You can make room for side-on creativity without trying to order it up. Follow something because you’re curious. Leave a question unresolved for a while. Occasionally go for a walk without giving yourself homework.
Then, when a connection arrives, do something about it – whatever that something is. Take a step in a direction – any direction. Ideas are fragments, let them oscillate for a while and then strike. Side-on thinking still needs head-on effort to turn it into a meal someone would actually like to eat.
That’s where I see the opportunity with AI. Let it help us work through the options, develop the idea and deal with some of the execution. Use the time that creates to have more of a life to draw from.
I’m betting on our uniquely human ability to go from A to B to purple. It would be a shame to spend all our time getting faster at A to B.
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