Can AI Make Us More Creative?
Craft, creativity, and talking to the machine
That’s the talk I agreed to give at the Creative Pro Summit.
And honestly, it’s an unusual topic for someone who built a career on craft, but it might be one of the most important talks I’ve given.
If you have 20 minutes, you can watch my mind break in the third act as I talk to the machine and build a working app in an evening.
We’re in an industrial revolution–scale transformation, happening at a speed we’ve never seen before.
The public hasn’t grasped the magnitude of it.
Online discourse, especially among creatives, swings between hype and fear. Zero-sum arguments. For or against.
We need better questions. More nuance.
So I said yes to giving this talk. Not because I had a clear picture of where it would land, but because I knew it would force me to take a snapshot of how this is actually affecting my work.
And in doing that, I started to find genuinely useful ways to use AI in my own work. Roles that AI can take. They’re all in the talk.
Assistant, editor, translator
It helps me cut through the clutter as an assistant.
It helps me explore and iterate as an editor.
And sometimes, it acts as a translator, letting me operate in areas I have little experience in.
That last role, the translator, is where things start to feel very different.
Boundaries between disciplines are melting, and it’s happening at a ridiculous rate. It’s the speed of improvement that makes it so hard to reason about where this is going.
Engineers can design. Designers can build apps. 2D artists can make 3D animations. And the list keeps growing.
If you’re curious about another creative discipline, chances are the technology to operate in it with intent is already there.
And for the areas where it’s not quite there yet, you only have to look at six-finger generations and spaghetti-eating videos to get a sense of how quickly it’s improving.
We’ve moved on from asking if something can be done to when it will be solved.
So to prepare, it’s probably safer to assume that anything with a reasonably defined input and output can be handled by a machine within the next few years.
What still matters
So where does that leave us, beyond our own work?
I’m honestly a bit shellshocked by the potential scale of what’s coming. This is going to get messy.
As designers and developers, we’re the vanguard. We’re forced to think about this now. For most people outside our bubble, AI is still just a story in the news or a small chatbot on their phone.
We are wholly unprepared for the future unfolding before us.
It might take years for this to fully ripple through society, but it will. And it will have widespread consequences. Big tech will sell us intelligence by the meter. And every white-collar job in the world is going to have to change.
So we’re going to have to decide what we actually want AI to do in our work.
For me, I don’t want AI to be the author. I don’t want it deciding the outcome. I don’t want to outsource creative judgment.
It can assist. It can expand what I can do. But it should help me do more of the work I actually enjoy.
Everyone will have to set their own boundaries. And we’ll probably keep renegotiating them as the technology evolves.
At the same time, we need real public conversations about ownership, environmental impact, and the potential dystopian use of this technology. That has to be balanced against the real benefits.
When everyone can build everything, what new value can be created?
We’re seeing an explosion of custom software. Will these tools democratize making into a multitude of new perspectives, or will it converge into mediocre slop?
Will design be revitalized by new people wielding these tools at a much lower barrier of entry, or will the low-effort nature of prompting drive down the value of human creativity?
I remain equal parts amazed and uneasy about this whole thing.
But it’s worth remembering it was never really our ability to operate tools that defined us.
It was our ability to decide what should exist.
Maybe that matters more now than it ever did.
I’m giving a live extended version of this talk with demo walkthroughs at the CreativePro Week in Nashville this summer. It’s an excellent hands-on conference with lots of excellent teachers. Would love to see you there.
