The idea that creative is doomed from the use of AI might be backwards. The creative is now in charge. It’s what defines good or bad in a simple sense. Taking us back to the idea of imagination. One’s imagination, consecutively, year over year, has been overtaken by the excessive amount of consumption rather than creation.
Creation is now on a 10x. It used to be quality was king. Then came the internet, and quantity took over. Then came the idea that it needed to be both, quality and quantity, or a reality TV version of creative - aka quantity without any craft, just raw, unedited - harder to produce than one might think - it comes down to personality rather than creativity.
With the idea of both coming together, it’s started to become throttled. Exhausted. Each piece of creative looks identical, or a close evolution of what came before it. It’s templatized, because efficiency has become the key, not creative. Be more efficient, produce more, get more views.
“I saw this thing, it did well. I think I like it. Do I like it because I like it, or because others like it? Let’s do that.” It’s a vicious cycle. A trend comes and goes in a matter of minutes rather than months or years. The trend isn’t even man-made, it’s algo-made.
So those suggesting AI has taken over - well, technology has already been determining your inspiration for many years.
And with AI, one’s imagination now has no limits. You had a dream, write it down and see what AI spits out. You have a vision that words alone can’t illustrate, throw it into an LLM. This inspiration is now the spark. And what counts is that raw, unfiltered imagination mixed with step two, curation.
It’s not about copying what others have created. That can be a tool, yes, but it’s a slippery slope. We now have a coworker to our imagination.
The issue now is, how do we harvest that unfiltered imagination we all used to have? That untainted vision of what wasn’t, but what could become. We’d turn static into motion, silence into a symphony, dullness into vividness. How do we reboot this idea of imagination without just getting inspired by other work?
In the subject of creativity, it’s about putting yourself in situations. Unlikely, unusual situations. A situation where you might ask yourself, “Is this real life?” Which I’ve realized is the sweet spot. Asking yourself, whether rhetorical or not, “Is this real life?” is a sign that you are, in fact, in an unusual situation. So outside of your rehearsed schedule, pushing aside all repetitive rituals, you can now open your eyes and take in the life around you. Get inspired. Find your imagination.
This is the opposite of flow state. Flow, preached to us as if it’s the godly creative state, is subjective. Flow can be good, without a doubt. I’ve had some crazy results from a state of flow. The day’s hours went by like minutes, and the outcome was better than I could have imagined. But I’ve also had flow where you’re the definition of locked in. You’re not in control. Your job is to complete a task, and that task is in absence of color and brings you down.
Bad flow is just bad, and should be monitored, not accepted as fact. And good flow exists at random. Maybe it’s from imagination, maybe it’s from that AM coffee, or that early workout, or that fun, no-stress scenario. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s good and bad flow. But the point is not to strive for flow anymore. Yes, flow may be part of the process, but the entry point to good creative is shifting. It’s slowing down, and relying on new tools. Or collaborating with new tools.
So maybe this isn’t the end of creativity, it’s a reset. The tools have caught up. Now the only real difference is the person using them. Their taste, their perspective, their imagination. AI can generate, iterate, scale. But it can’t decide what’s worth making. That part is still ours. And maybe that’s the point. Strip everything back, remove the noise, and what’s left is the thing that always mattered. Imagination.
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