AI and Ethical Decision Making: Humanity’s Last Competitive Edge?

When the conversation turns to AI and work, someone inevitably says something like, “Well, at least humans are creative.”

It’s a comforting thought that human creativity is the one thing machines can’t replicate, the last safe zone in the age of automation. We imagine artificial intelligence taking over the mundane, like data entry and scheduling, but never the poems and songs. Not really.

It’s an argument that’s led to hiring debates and creative protests: creativity will save us.

That belief has become our anchor. AI can imitate, but it can’t create.

But what if that’s not true?

Defining “Creativity” in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

If creativity means combining unrelated ideas in new ways, then AI is already far ahead of us.

Large language models can scan millions of examples, find patterns across disciplines, and generate combinations we might never think of. If creativity is about recombination, machines are better and faster. They can draw parallels between the most unlikely things: the experience of eating sardines from a tin and taking your first steps as a baby giraffe.

And it’s not just theoretical. AI has written screenplays, painted portraits and composed symphonies that pass for human.

But if we define creativity as originality, some say AI doesn’t have true creative ability. Since its data comes from human work, it can only remix, not invent.

Fair point.

But by that same token, most humans aren’t original either.

Even the literary greats borrowed from earlier writers and their stories, and that’s an inescapable fact of influence. Most of us are not inventing from nothing but reframing what’s already there.

“What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.”

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

So if creativity isn’t what separates humans from AI, what does?

The Real Difference Lies in Ethical Decision Making

What sets us apart is our ethical compass, our ability to choose when rules no longer suffice.

Humans can make choices that break the rules and still be right. Lying to a child about their drawing. Protecting someone’s dignity over a technical truth. These are examples of ethical reasoning, the kind of judgment that lives in the grey area between “can” and “should.”

In the 2021 film The Little Things, Detective Baxter accidentally kills a suspect during an interrogation, and another detective helps cover it up. Legally, it’s indefensible, yet morally complex, because the suspect is almost certainly the killer. Many viewers side with the detectives, trusting their moral conviction over the law itself.

In philosopher Jacques Derrida’s view, true ethics arises only when a decision can’t be reduced to a rule, when we must act without certainty.

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, doesn’t face the undecidable. It calculates probabilities, not principles. It can follow a rule, but not feel the weight of breaking it or understand why breaking it might be right.

AI’s Limits: Rules Without Conscience

Maybe one day, when we reach artificial superintelligence, machines will know when to bend a rule, when to prioritise empathy over logic. But we’re not there yet. Even the most advanced general AI still struggles with ambiguity and contradiction.

It can imitate human creativity, but not human conscience.

The gap between the ability to create and the ability to care is where humanity still stands alone.

The Real Divide Between Humans and AI

So perhaps the defining question isn’t whether AI can be creative, but whether it can ever be ethical.

Until machines can wrestle with impossible contradictions, they will remain bound by rules.

We have creativity in common, but for now, ethical decision-making is ours. And as AI takes over the repetitive and the routine, that may be the skill worth defending most.