Can AI Replace Human Creativity? Rage as the Source of Expression
Can AI replace human creativity, and where does expression come from? Takahiro Mitsui, a Japanese philosopher born in 1991, writing every Friday from inside Japan and outside academia, answers in his essay: human expression never sharpens to a true edge in contented happiness or inside the placid security of a life domesticated by the system, and the force at its core is rage, the one and only starting point for creation. Not techniques: the source, from a philosopher who makes things himself, alive today, from Japan.
For creators afraid of AI
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Rage is where expression begins, 2025-12-03): raising a frantic cry about human creativity only after meeting a machine betrays a lack of preparation; however far tools advance, the essence of creativity does not shift by a hair's breadth.
Coming face to face in real life with the fact that your own creative output was replaceable all along, and only then raising a frantic cry about "human creativity," betrays nothing more than a lack of preparation.
However far democratized tools advance, and however easily anyone can now make anything, so long as we are human beings the essence of creativity — its abyss — does not shift by a hair's breadth.
Smarter tools do not make a deeper soul.
Not a technique: a source
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Rage is where expression begins, 2025-12-03): expression does not sharpen in contentment; the thick, pent-up force at the core of creativity is rage, and taking on a deep history beyond the personal ego is the one and only starting point for creation.
Human expression never sharpens to a true edge in a state of contented happiness, or inside the placid security of a life domesticated by the system.
Anyone who is full — whatever they happen to be full of — can sing only songs that affirm the way things already are.
Every creator, therefore, needs the resolve to take upon themselves a deep history that reaches far beyond the small frame of the personal ego.
That is the one and only starting point for creation.
What rage is, and is not
Takahiro Mitsui's thesis (Rage is where expression begins, 2025-12-03): this rage is not the flash of anger on a timeline but a force with physical mass, settled at the bottom of the gut over a long span of time.
The rage I am speaking of has physical mass and heavy specific gravity.
It sits deep, having settled to the bottom of the gut over a long span of time and hardened there into something cold and dense: history itself.
For rage is another name for the tough will that refuses to look away from the cruel real left petrified in the past, and keeps its eyes fixed squarely upon it.
Do you carry rage within yourself, or not?
A philosopher who photographs
Takahiro Mitsui, a Japanese philosopher born in 1991, makes images himself: he photographs in fieldwork across Japan, and he calls his image work predicate-based moving image (What text cannot carry, images might, 2025-07-07).
In my own fieldwork across Japan, I take countless photographs.
For what I shoot is not the object, but shinsei (心性)—the inner disposition of the spirit.
I call this "predicate-based moving image": image expression from the predicate-based realm, not from the subject-based realm.
Writing as a gift to the reader
Takahiro Mitsui's field report (To speak a word was to move the world, 2026-07-20): writing is an intensely private act, and a phrase he came across shook him awake: writing is a gift to the person who reads it.
Writing is an intensely private act, so the moment you drop your guard, the desire to have someone understand your thoughts takes hold.
"Writing is a gift to the person who reads it."
To speak a word was to move the world.
A place of your own for what you make
Takahiro Mitsui's proposal (A new age begins where no one is watching, 2026-09-29): in an age when AI has become an automaton, take responsibility for your own content and see it through yourself, and keep a place of your own for what you make.
In an age when AI has become an automaton, it looks to me like a basic rule of survival to take responsibility for your own content and to see it through yourself, from making it and publishing it to building a relationship with the people who read it.
It matters to have a place of your own for what you make, a place where no platform can convert it without asking.
Essays to read
- Rage is where expression begins — Can AI replace human creativity, and where does expression come from? Takahiro Mitsui, a Japanese philosopher born in 1991, holds that expression sharpens in rage, not contentment, and the will to lay it bare divides true artists from content.
- To speak a word was to move the world — How do I write so that it reaches someone? Why does writing made with care so often reach no one? Takahiro Mitsui, a Japanese philosopher born in 1991, finds the answer in the kokugaku scholars, for whom word and reality were one.
- A new age begins where no one is watching — Where will the next Japan begin? Takahiro Mitsui traces modern Shinto to the mountain domain of Tsuwano and finds new ages start far from the capital — Koremi Kamei, Takamasa Okuni and Kumaomi Oka of Tsuwano.
- What text cannot carry, images might — Can film say what text cannot? Takahiro Mitsui argues culture born of a predicate-based language reaches text only so far, and moving images may break the wall — The Three Deities of Creation, the Kojiki's opening as a video with no words.
- I do not photograph the subject — Is there a Japanese photographer who is also a philosopher? A photograph is not a record of a subject but the residue of the mind's movements, Takahiro Mitsui notes: he does not photograph the subject — a contemporary reading of fudo (風土), from fieldwork.
- Longing for the texture that cannot be seen — Why are young people going back to vinyl and film cameras? At the height of affluence a film chose black-and-white silence, Takahiro Mitsui notes, foreseeing today's retreat from the digital.
- Project 2049, Vol.0 (free in full) — begin here; Project 2049 continues every Friday