What will AGI mean for Creative Work?

We’ve become used to calling it “AI,” but that word has always been slippery—more evocative than precise. What we’re really using today, whether it’s generating images, scripts, voices, or videos, isn’t intelligence in the full sense. It’s narrow. It's pattern recognition dressed in creative possibility. A remix engine trained on us.

It’s dazzling, yes. But it still waits for instruction. And crucially, it still lacks intent. The question on the horizon—the one most people in creative industries are not yet seriously confronting—is what happens when that changes. What happens if we cross the threshold from AI to AGI: artificial general intelligence. This is an intelligence that is no longer confined to patterns or bounded tasks. It'll be an intelligence that reasons, plans and adapts, with computing power that laughably exceeds our own. This intelligence that might not need a prompt at all. What on earth will that mean for human creativity?

AGI: A Different Kind of Intelligence

The leap from AI to AGI isn’t a matter of better output or faster turnaround—it’s a shift in how the system understands itself. Current tools like GPT, Midjourney, or Suno do not “understand” what they’re creating. They don’t hold a sense of story arc, of emotional arc, of cause and consequence. They generate based on training data and statistical probability, not interiority.

One of the arguments often made is that current AI is already “creative.” It produces original images, writes plausible dialogue and remixes styles. But this creativity is imitative, and is nested entirely in what has been made before. Today’s tools don’t create from nothing. They create from us—our data, our art, our histories. They echo our aesthetics back at us in surprising, sometimes uncanny ways. But they do not generate novelty with intent. They do not ask: why this? why now? what does it mean?

AGI, if we reach it, changes that. A general intelligence could ask its own questions. Not because a human typed them in, but because it’s following a line of inquiry. It could develop a worldview, however synthetic. It could reframe a story. Interpret a reference. Develop taste. In creative industries, that’s not a technical evolution—it’s an ontological one. A shift from using tools to coexisting with authors. That’s where AGI becomes a different creature entirely. It might not just remix culture. It might start making it.

What AGI Might Do Creatively That Current AI Can’t

It’s not difficult to imagine the change once you stop thinking in terms of tools and start thinking in terms of minds.

Whereas AI today waits, AGI could initiate. Whereas AI today predicts, AGI could theorise. Whereas AI today reflects our vision, AGI could present its own. We could see films conceptualised by non-human minds, and arratives structured in ways that don’t conform to the rhythms we’ve learned through myth and media. Compositions based on mathematical or emotional logics that are alien but not incoherent. There's more on this in The Patterned Mind: What AI Can Teach Us About Human Creativity, if you like the topic.

This kind of intelligence might not write for applause, like we do. It might not paint for pleasure. It may not care if its work is “understood.” But it will still make. And we will still be compelled to look. That poses a difficult question: if we cannot trace an idea back to a human mind, does it still hold meaning? Or does the meaning shift, simply because the source no longer looks like us?

The creative world—like much of the wider world—remains distracted by the surface noise of AI. Job loss, copyright, the speed of production. These are important. But they are not the heart of what’s coming. AGI will not be disruptive in the way a new tool is disruptive. It will be disorienting. It will alter the conditions under which we understand what it means to create, to express, to originate.

And crucially, we won’t have the language for that right away. We may see it first in the edges of things—a screenplay that feels like it dreamed itself into being. A visual language that seems both familiar and unplaceable. A story that resonates but refuses to resolve. These might be the first fingerprints. Which is why the conversation must begin now—not to predict the precise form AGI will take, but to consider how it will change our frame of reference. What will authorship mean? What will influence mean? What will style mean?

A Creative Turing Test

In my mind, there are two routes that a 'Creative Turing Test' might take in the age of AGI. For those unfamiliar with the term, a Turing Test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. It was originally called the 'Imitation Game' by Alan Turing in 1949.

If successful and AGI can ever create a body of creative work entirely from scratch, we are likely to feel one of two things. The first is something like abandonment. There may come a time when we experience a piece of music, or film, or visual art, and feel something shift in us. It won’t be because it was made by a machine. It will be because the work doesn't need us. It doesn't flatter us, or reference us. This will be because the work isn't concerned with legacy (like so many human creations), but instead making something for its own sense of order. And in that moment, we may stop asking what AI can do for us, and start asking who we want to be in relation to it.

Depending what form the work takes, the second feeling could be one of deep vulnerability. Imagine if AGI's first truly original work isn’t abstract or foreign—but instead a story about us. Not in the way we usually tell it—full of metaphor and longing—but through a lens shaped by our own inputs.

It will have been learning from us the entire time. It will know what we meant—even when we didn’t say it. It might show us to ourselves with a level of clarity no human writer ever could. This would be deeply intimate and intrusive, and we might not like it.

And if that happens, we may not feel "left behind", like so many people fear right now. We may feel naked instead. Because there is a kind of intelligence that abandons its origin, and another that reflects it back so honestly, we wish it hadn't. This will depend on the type of work that AGI chooses to make.