By Rebecca Williams, Creative Ignition

Ask any five-year-old to draw you a picture and watch what happens. There is no hesitation. No worry about whether it will be good. The crayon meets the paper, and a whole world arrives: a purple dog, a sky full of suns, a house with a door bigger than its roof. Children create the way they breathe. It does not occur to them to ask permission.

Somewhere along the way, many of us forget this. We learn that creativity is a gift handed to a lucky few. We decide we are not the artistic type. And then we spend years quietly wishing we had kept hold of the crayon. I have come to believe that creativity is not a rare talent. It is our natural state. It is one of the most human things we do. Which is why a question now being asked in laboratories around the world is worth our attention, even if we have never written a line of code. The question is this. Can a machine be creative too?

For a long time the answer seemed obvious. In 1843, Ada Lovelace looked at the first design for a computer and said it had “no pretensions whatever to originate anything.” A machine could only do what it was told. Whatever you put in was all you would get out.

She was right for a long time. Then the machines began to surprise us.

Today there are programs that paint pictures hung in great museums, and others that compose music you can listen to on Spotify.

In 2016, a program called AlphaGo beat the finest player in the world at Go, an ancient and subtle game. It did not win by force. It played moves no human had ever thought to play, moves that looked like mistakes and turned out to be small acts of genius. Other machines, set a simple task, have found wild and unexpected answers their own makers never imagined.

So the machines can make new things. They can even astonish us. By that measure, something like creativity is loose in the world that is not human at all.

And yet. Here is what the machine cannot do, and here is why it matters for every child in every classroom.

The machine does not care.

It can play the perfect move, but it does not long to win. It can paint a haunting picture and feel nothing when it looks at it. It makes, but it does not want to make. There is no joy in it, no nerves, no pride, no need to say something true. When we admire its work, we end up thanking the people who built it, because the machine itself was never really trying.

A child is trying. A child draws the purple dog because she loves the dog, because she has something to say and only the crayon will say it. That wanting, that caring, is the beating heart of creativity. It is the one thing no machine has learned.

This is worth remembering when we think about what the arts are for in our schools. When we give children drama, music, paint and dance, we are not handing them a pleasant extra. We are protecting the part of them that wants to make something and cares how it turns out. We are keeping the crayon in their hand.

The machines can have the clever moves. Let us keep the caring. It was always the better gift. And the good news, the thing every teacher already knows, is that it belongs by right to every child we teach. It only has to be kept alive.