The Patterned Mind: What AI Can Teach Us About Human Creativity

There’s something strange about the way human creativity tends to echo itself. From ancient myths to modern cinema. From Gregorian chants to TikTok earworms. From cave drawings to logo design. Across time and medium, we seem drawn to the same patterns. We don’t just recognise them, but something chimes in us when we experience them.

We replay the same chord progressions. We shoot photographs using the same 'rule of thirds'. We build brand logos using the same golden ratios. We craft songs with the same verse–chorus–verse structure, and tell stories with arcs that haven't changed in 3,000 years. And crucially, we feel good when things follow these patterns. We feel resolved, connected and in tune. So here’s the unsettling thought: what if the human creative instinct isn’t endlessly free, but fundamentally structured? And if that’s true, if we’re all dancing within invisible guardrails, then AI may not be at odds with human creativity. It may simply be exposing its skeleton, and helping us to become better creatives ourselves.

The codes beneath creativity

This isn’t just about plot structure. Our love for patterns runs deeper, across every medium. Take music. The “four-chord song” joke made famous by comedy group Axis of Awesome highlights just how many global pop hits rely on the exact same progression: I–V–vi–IV. Why? Because it works. Our ears and brains find it satisfying.

Or photography. The rule of thirds appears in nearly every “how to compose a photo” guide, whether you’re a beginner or a professional. We don’t always follow it consciously, but our eyes are drawn to compositions that do. The symmetry feels “right.”

In design and architecture, the golden ratio appears again and again, from the Parthenon to Apple’s logo. It’s not because someone imposed a rule, but because it creates a natural balance that we find aesthetically pleasing.

Even language follows similar grooves. From sonnets to slogans, we love rhythm and repetition: “veni, vidi, vici.” “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “Just do it.” These aren’t coincidences. They’re signs of something deeper. Human creativity isn’t chaos, it’s choreography, and we may not be choreographing as freely as we think.

The universal loop

I'm very interested in storytelling. When studying classic storytelling tropes and structure as a student, I was obsessed with the fact that so many stories across cultures and generations have the same themes.

Joseph Campbell called it the monomyth: the idea that virtually all storytelling cultures, separated by geography and time, follow the same core arc of separation, initiation, and return. It's why we love Toy Story, Harry Potter, The Little Mermaid, Lord of the Rings, Moana and countless other tales that have exactly the same core plot: a hero is faced with a dire threat, leaves the safety of home to fight the opposing force alongside unlikely allies, and returns stronger with new knowledge to benefit their community.

In his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell mapped this journey across mythology, religion, folklore, and fiction. He found the same skeleton beneath wildly different skins.

John Yorke took this further in Into the Woods, arguing that story structure isn’t just cultural, it’s cognitive. That we’re wired for conflict, climax, and resolution. That we crave symmetry not because we were trained to, but because it mirrors something deep in the way we make sense of the world.

Storytelling, then, isn’t learned. It’s recalled. It’s instinctual. As if there’s a map built into the human brain, and the act of creativity is not forging a new path, but finding your way through familiar terrain.

AI is a mirror

If you're a writer who has used AI tooling to help build stories, you'll have noticed something quite early on. When an AI writes a story, it doesn’t understand theme or metaphor the way we do. It doesn’t experience struggle. It isn’t alive. But what it does very well is pattern. It consumes billions of words, stories, scripts, and summaries. It maps the probabilities. It sees, in raw statistical terms, the rhythm of human storytelling. So when an AI gives us a perfectly functional, structurally sound narrative, we often dismiss it as uninspired. Too tidy. Too expected.

But look closer. We do the same. We write in acts. We crave arcs. We reward symmetry. We recognise the midpoint twist before it arrives because we’ve seen it before. And more importantly: we want to. The AI is only reflecting our own patterns back to us at speed and at scale, with no pretence. And maybe that’s what makes us uncomfortable: not that the AI lacks originality, but that it reveals just how much of ours is constructed.

So, is infinite creativity a myth?

This leads me on to perhaps the most unsettling point of all. We, as creative people, like to consider our creative energy as unbounded by constraint. A sacred source of power, with no limits, no guardrails. But what if that's not true? What if creativity is structured, bounded, and governed by invisible parameters, evolved over millennia not to delight, but to make sense? What if our brains, like AI models, are constantly scanning for patterns to remix rather than inventing from scratch?

I don't just mean in the way Austin Kleon describes in Steal Like An Artist, that "every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.” I'm suggesting we consider a further step: that creative guardrails are built in to our psyche in some fundamental way. We have to ask ourselves: when we create, are we discovering new territory, or walking deeper into the grooves already carved into the collective mind? Even our most transcendent works of art are often praised for how they subvert the formula, not escape it entirely. Structure is always the shadow.

Seeing the blueprint

But here’s the twist: maybe that’s not a bad thing. Consider the haiku. The sonnet. The twelve-bar blues. The three-act film. These are not cages, they’re canvases. They’re rules that create meaning through limitation. The tighter the box, the more explosive the spark can feel.

AI follows structure because it must. We follow structure because we choose to. And in that distinction lies something vital. Human creativity isn't about avoiding patterns. It’s about dancing with them. Teasing them. Bending them just enough to feel fresh, but not so much that we fall off the map.

What AI offers us isn’t just new tools. It’s a new perspective. A mirror that shows us the blueprints beneath our own creative instincts. We criticise AI for being predictable, but what if it's just accurate? What if our resistance to AI-generated creativity isn’t about taste, but discomfort? Perhaps we’re not ready to see the bones of the processes we thought were sacred laid bare. Because when a machine learns to write, to paint or to compose, it’s not pulling that structure from nowhere. It’s learning from us. From our stories. Our habits. Our subconscious patterns. The scary part isn’t that AI might become creative. The scary part is that it already looks creative, by simply doing what we do.

What AI reveals about the creative core

And now, this is where the earlier insight gets sharper. When an AI produces something that feels formulaic, we shrug. But when it produces something that feels good, we get uncomfortable. Because it suggests that maybe creativity isn’t magic, maybe it’s not divine. Maybe it’s not unique to the human soul. Perhaps it’s pattern, and when executed well enough, that pattern becomes emotional.

That’s a bit of a bombshell. Not because it makes us obsolete, but because it makes us visible. It suggests that the same creative “magic” we attribute to genius might simply be pattern fluency applied with taste and intention. We like to think we’re building from scratch, but maybe we’re remixing blueprints we’ve never even seen.

A new creative ethos

So what now? If AI can mimic the outputs of our creative instincts, should we panic? Or should we take a closer look at the instincts themselves?

This isn’t a loss. It’s an opportunity. To move past the surface of originality, to understand the forces that shape creativity, and to choose how to respond. There is two main ways in which I believe the realisations in this article are positive for humankind, and for creativity as a whole.

1) AI can help us understand the sources of creative expression, by giving us deeper and more ready access to the collective mind.

2) This understanding, in turn, helps us become closer to our ancestors. Everything we are drawing from is already written in the stars, and echoed by all the people that went before us. These new tools don't have to be at odds with that. They can help us find it.

We’re not just copy-paste robots. We bring meaning to patterns. Where AI sees a likely next word, we see a metaphor. Where AI loops a melody, we hear heartbreak. Where AI finds symmetry, we find story. All of that is still ours. But we share more with the machine than we’d like to admit.