Is AI Worth Killing Our Creativity Over?
We must reclaim the creative spaces we once owned, now seen as AI—before we reduce ourselves to a mechanical voice.
Words Marc Nathaniel Servo
Art by Martina Reyes
December 22, 2025
Is AI really worth killing our creativity over?
Skate Avenue PH has recently gone viral when their artificially-generated cover music charted in Spotify Philippines, much to the dismay of local artists. These songs are covers of popular music, which not only take over musicians’ possible revenues, but make light of the passion these artists invested in. Globally, AI music has broken similar records, with even some reports stating that a lot of people “resonate” with this kind of musical regurgitation.
“Walk my walk” by Breaking Rust recently hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales Chart with over 3 million streams in less than a month. Many AI artists have plagued music platforms, and even in YouTube, AI covers using popular voices gain traction—turning even our voices into commodities that a code could steal.
More than wonder, fear is the most pronounced feeling—of being replaceable, of being witchhunted for feeling “AI.” Slowly, our creative spaces are encroached by foreigners who stole our words, our sounds, and our strokes—until one day, we are left as a skeleton of the humanity we once had.
Literary writer Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s work, “The Ellipsis Pact,” painted this bleak future given up to AI, in the fate of Planet E: “To use the mark was to risk suspicion, and people altered their language accordingly. Writers recast sentences, speakers modified their pauses, students revised their notes, and poets re-shaped their lines. This initial act of avoidance began a wider transformation of self-alteration.”
In the piece, members of Planet E found the use of AI exemplary, and so, its uses were applied globally. Slowly, to prove humanity, they veered away from anything artificial—once the popping colors, and then the pauses, until came the ellipsis.
This is the cardinal mistake of our own kind, to surrender our own humanity over artificial intelligence. Why should we avoid the things that make us human just because AI uses them too?
To prevent the wrong use of AI, we punish ourselves for using what was taken from us, instead of limiting AI in the first place. When we use em dashes, people easily dismiss our works as AI. When animators accidentally put an extra finger on a character, mobs are quick to demonize their work.
The thing is, when we hate AI without limiting them, we only end up hating ourselves—the human in us which this foreigner took the liberty to replicate. We become akin to white cells killing healthy cells due to the influence of a virus. We become foreign to ourselves.
So in the rise of AI, rather than putting ourselves in a corner by avoiding AI-like attributions, we must reclaim our place—the oddly popping colors of our videos, the weird extra limbs to our art, the em dashes that every literary writer loves—and the music that once composed our humanity.
These are parts of ourselves that we must proudly embrace. The boxes we are putting ourselves in are better placed on AI—to put discretion over exploration. To take heed by not allowing it to become a weapon to depose artists of the livelihood they're struggling to keep.
If generative AI is the problem, then it’s time to call quits with it. It’s time we embrace the human: to be creatively imperfect and experimental.
