08/28/2026
🤖🎨 THE CASE FOR HUMAN CREATIVITY IN AN AI WORLD
Let's start here: AI isn't the enemy of creativity.
It can help us research, learn new skills, organize our thoughts, and make information more accessible.
But as AI gets increasingly good at generating images, music, writing, video, and design, there's another question worth asking:
What do we lose when we stop creating things ourselves?
Making something exercises imagination. We sit with uncertainty. Make choices. Develop taste and a point of view. Try something, decide it doesn't work, and try again.
And you don't have to consider yourself an artist.
📸 Take the photograph. Try taking it 20 different ways.
🎃 Make the Halloween costume. Sew, duct tape, markers on a white t-shirt - it doesn't matter.
🎁 Create the gift. "Wrapped with love!"
🎂 Design the birthday party invitation. Bring back the magazine collage!
✍️ Write the toast yourself. We promise it'll be better and mean more.
🖍️ Invent something ridiculous with your kids. A family that gets silly together makes the best memories.
Research suggests there may be good reason to protect that creative muscle. Studies of generative AI have found that while AI can help individuals produce strong ideas, relying on it for brainstorming can also reduce the diversity of ideas produced by a group. UNESCO has similarly warned about the potential for generative AI to contribute to cultural homogenization.
In other words: AI might help each of us get somewhere faster while gradually making where we all end up a little more alike.
There's an environmental consideration, too. Generating AI images and video requires significant computing infrastructure and can be considerably more energy-intensive than simpler AI tasks. Clicking “generate” isn't quite as immaterial as it feels.
So use AI if you wish. Let it help you research. Learn from it. Let it handle the tedious stuff.
But occasionally?
Keep the creative part for yourself.
And when the creative work you need is beyond your abilities, consider choosing a person instead.
Hire the designer. Commission the artist. Pay the photographer. Buy the musician's work. See the performance.
Human artists bring something a generator cannot independently possess: lived experience, cultural perspective, thoughtful curation, years of practice, taste, curiosity, experimentation, and an individual point of view.
Efficiency need not always be the point. We are all more than just our efficiency.
💛 In an AI world, perhaps we should be especially intentional about exercising—and valuing—our human imagination.
