BE CReATiVe Not Generative

Mark Gash lays out why your creative process trumps AI.

I don’t know about you, but all of my best ideas come to me when I’m lathering up in the shower (apologies for that mental image) or driving in the car. Both are inconvenient places where I can’t easily jot down my thoughts, and I have to try and keep a hold of them until I can grab a pen or a phone to make notes. Then, later, I have to decipher my scribbles and typos to produce the first coherent iteration of whatever it was that popped into my head.

The chances of that initial version making it to print/design/LMS/client are virtually 0. The idea will be run past other people, argued over, remade, tweaked and binned before it eventually spawns at least 3 final versions, resulting in IDEA-FINAL-FINAL-V3C eventually seeing the light of day. And that is my creative process. I’d wager it might also be yours because, like me, you’re human. Creativity isn’t a linear process - it goes forward, backwards, side-to-side and upside-down before it settles on something great. So what’s with the shift towards outsourcing the creative process to AI chatbots?

AI is revolutionising the way we work - it’s a fantastic tool for automating tasks, doing some surface-level research and getting quick answers to questions that you already pretty much know the answer to. It can’t do everything humans can do, but many of us have ignored this fact and seem to think it’s a miracle solution to every problem - even creativity. AI doesn’t have a creative process, it has a generative process - it spits out content based on patterns, data and algorithms. It doesn’t have brainwaves in the shower, sparked off by the fear of seeing a spider out of the corner of its eye or the pain of stubbing its toe on the plughole. Because AI doesn’t know fear or pain - it’s essentially a Terminator and can only operate within its programming and emulate what it knows about humans.

The two most creative humans I know are my kids. They can make a Disney-worthy story out of seeing a squirrel in the garden and can turn an empty Amazon box into a spaceship. Getting to the end result has them arguing, correcting themselves, ripping the living room apart, grazing their knees and throwing glitter everywhere, but they eventually create something they are happy with. They are human emotion, pain, and creativity at its most raw. Just getting them to brush their teeth is an epic struggle against the odds.

Now imagine if my kids were powered by AI. They’d brush their teeth when told, tell me the life cycle of a squirrel and put the Amazon box in the recycling bin. Sure, I could ask them to create a story about the squirrel or give me instructions on turning the box into a spaceship, but is it going to have that same magic?

AI will pretty much do exactly what you tell it to. Ask it for an idea, a design, or a storyline, and it will give you one. But is it the right one? It might be technically sound, aesthetically pleasing, or cleverly phrased. But is it your solution?

As a human being, could you take what AI generates and hand-on-heart say that it’s as good as, or better than, something you would create? Would you put your name to an AI-generated story?

The creative process is an extension of you. In an organisation, it’s a reflection of your team and your culture. It’s why your clients come to you - they get a service, a solution or a product that could only have come from your imagination, your efforts and countless lightbulb moments and revisions. Relying on AI to generate content means you’re skipping over the arguments, the iterations, and, let’s face it, the joy of creating something that other people think is cool. When you get a “like” on Instagram, it gives you a hit - someone appreciates that photo of the squirrel you took. In fact, you took 27 photos of the squirrel because it kept moving and wouldn’t show you its face for the first 22 shots, and then the next 4 were blurred. Would you get the same hit if you posted an AI-generated image of a squirrel and random people gave it a like?

Essentially, using AI means you’re outsourcing your creativity, but in doing so, are you unwittingly talking yourself out of a job?

I mean, if AI can do all the generating, what’s left for you to do? But then again, if the clients keep paying, does it matter?

I guess that depends on how much stock you put in calling yourself a creative. If we, as creative professionals, start to accept AI-generated solutions as “good enough,” then what happens to creativity? The answer is simple: it dies. You might as well hang up your hat, pack up your desk, and let the robots take over. Because when you stop engaging in the creative process - when you stop creating - you’re no longer a creative. You’re just a manager of AI outputs.

AI can only ever give you what it’s learned from human input. It scrapes the internet and churns out remixes of what has come before. The irony is, in years to come, AI will eventually run out of original human ideas to mimic, and we’ll be left with a world where everything is a recycled pastiche of creativity from decades ago. Don’t mistake generating for creating.

Creativity is a deeply human, personal process, one that involves emotion, intuition, and, more often than not, an irrational fear of spiders in the shower. AI might help streamline some tasks, but when it comes to creativity, only you can truly add value. The minute you stop creating, the minute you stop being human in your approach, you lose the essence of what makes your creative work so powerful and valuable. Embrace AI’s ability to generate. But don’t let it replace your ability to create.

Ok, I’m off to ask Freepik to knock me up some imagery for this article…