Here's a truth about AI, stripped of the hysteria.
I jotted this down only two weeks ago, but it feels like a lifetime already because of everything that's been announced since. Life moves fast, as Ferris said.
Here's a truth about AI, stripped of the hysteria: We're not witnessing the death of creativity – we're watching its evolution unfold in real-time.
Think about the first time someone put a pencil to paper. Did we panic about the death of memory? When Gutenberg fired up his press, did we mourn the loss of hand-written manuscripts? No. We adapted. We evolved. We soared.
AI isn't your replacement – it's your creative ally. It's the assistant that handles the mechanical while you focus on the meaningful.
But here's an insight that’s often missed: As we build these digital scaffolds around our creative process, we're not just saving time – we're often compensating for skills we didn’t develop enough, or at all, in the first place.
It's like learning to drive without understanding how an engine works. The car still gets you where you need to go, but there's a disconnect from the underlying mechanics. And sometimes, that's perfectly fine.
Other times, it matters deeply.
But – and this is where it gets interesting – there's a worthy tension here. While AI helps us leap over technical hurdles, we must never lose sight of the raw, human insights that make creative work resonate.
Understanding the fundamentals of storytelling, human psychology, and cultural nuance – that's the difference between work that matters and work that merely exists.
The future isn't about AI replacing humans. It's about creators/designers/makers/directors who understand how to orchestrate these new tools in service of bigger, bolder, more human ideas. Because at the end of the day, no algorithm can replicate the electricity of a perfectly timed cultural moment or the raw emotion of a story well told.
We're not facing a mass extinction event apocalypse. We're on our way to experiencing a renaissance.
The question isn't whether AI will replace us – it's how we'll use it to amplify what makes us uniquely human.
Art credit: @bestpixels_ and Lego Masters campaign by Marco Sodano and Geometry Global Hong Kong