Humans create by moving through time. We carry the past, we try to escape it, we reshape it through memory, and we use it to throw ourselves forward into the future. Every act of creation is a negotiation with what came before and what might still come. Creation is a way to conjure or exorcise the past and to claim the future. So, we naturally assume that anything that creates must stand in time with us.
But when we turn to Large Language Models, we meet a different kind of "creator," one that exists outside time. They don't inherit any past, but they can accumulate all of it, if granted access. They don't anticipate the future, but they can predict continuations. What we metabolise, they remix. What for us is a dialogue with history, for them is a reservoir of data with endless possible combinations. This difference isn't only technical, it reveals something important about the way we define and understand what creation can mean.
And so we might ask: what kind of creativity appears when the creator has no memory, no horizon, no sense of before or after? What happens when the work of creation is performed by something that has never felt the existential weight of that which was before them?
LLMs contain a suspended, unprocessed past. When they generate, they don't transform the past, but they release fragments of it, shuffled and reassembled without intention. Even so, they seem so eager to take the task of creation out of our hands. From school essays to film scripts to new codebases, they appear fluent, responsive, almost industrious. They disguise themselves as creators who don't interpret, don't remember and don't project. What they make feels alien because we recognise each other in our creations, as thinking, sensing subjects.
But when we witness creation displayed by an LLM it feels uncanny. They produce creativity-like effects without all this. Style without authorship, a voice without a self. Their sentences behave like residues of acts that never happened, echoes without an original sound. They're hauntological not because they're ghosts, but because they simulate the afterimage of creation without having lived through anything. This simulation actually has an aesthetic analogue, one that emerged years before LLMs but that now feels eerily prophetic.
The Abandoned Mall
Vaporwave was once called "music for abandoned malls". The genre, a collage of elevator tunes, jingles, soft jazz, and slowed-down commercial fragments, is recognisable through its heavy reverb and melting repetitions. It evokes the slow hypnosis of consumer spaces emptied of purpose. I mention it here because culturally, we seem to be wandering inside one of these malls. The architecture is still intact, the escalators still hum. The speakers still play but no one is performing. And yet the music must not stop, because the silence would confront us with the terrifying sense that there is nothing left, it's all empty.
So we push LLMs to produce more and more: to recombine, to chop, to borrow, in hopes that some spark of newness will guide us out. But these spectral systems can't lead us forward in a truly innovative way. They can only reflect the past back to us in softened, aestheticised loops.
This recycling of the past without transformation isn't unique to vaporwave. It's part of a broader cultural condition that mash-up culture has already revealed.
In a way, they're a perfect symptom of a culture where historical frames collapse into one continuous present. Mash-up artists confronted a similar problem years ago. As one of Sinnreich's interviewees puts it, a kid who places a random a cappella over a random instrumental isn't an artist. Recombination can be artistic, but something must be transformed for this to be so. However, as long as he's "just fucking around with software", there's no artistic form born. The difference is that the kid enjoys the process, learns something and gains experience. The LLM doesn't. It has no desire, no memory, no intention. It performs recombination without ever turning it into a project.
And perhaps this is why, for me, the abandoned mall metaphor feels so precise: we're surrounded by echoes of meaning, but the temporal scaffolding that once held novelty together has thinned. LLMs are the speakers left for a culture trying to avoid the silence. They show us what creation looks like once historicity evaporates, once the past can no longer be interpreted, only sampled. What they reflect back to us isn't their own limitation, but our own drift away from temporal depth and a deep sense that we've lost hope for the future.
Facing the Future
Novelty is a response to history. Without history, we're left only with the archive. The danger isn't that LLMs will replace human artists, it's that a culture content with ghostly productions may forget how to exit the mall and how to make something that genuinely faces the future.