Does AI Kill Creativity?

I was born in the Midwest, and as a child, I spent a great deal of time on the playground. In those days, playgrounds were quite simple, albeit somewhat dangerous. Many reading this will remember when they flew off the merry-go-round or swing and maybe even broke a bone. For most of us, the playground was also a place to create. We would come up with creative ways to play and act out various fantasies. We would daydream we were solving mysteries or going on adventures. The playground became a “baseline” for creativity that we would build upon.

In the early 1980s, my parents made the decision to give up the cold winters of the midwest and move us to Kissimmee Florida to be close to my grandparents. We got to live on this amazing lake where my brother, cousin and I would have many adventures that we would augment with our creativity. Almost immediately, my grandparents bought us passes to Walt Disney World. They would often bring us to the Magic Kingdom theme park where they would let us roam the park while they spent the day people watching from a bench on Main Street.

Walt Disney’s vision for the ultimate playground became my new baseline for creativity. My imagination ran wild and frankly got us into trouble a time or two. Like the time we decided to sneak my cousins ape suit in so we could hide in these caves on “Tom Sawyers Island” and scare unsuspecting tourists. Walt’s amazingly creative theme park was now the baseline that we would create from and the imagination soared! I feel strongly that this helped me develop my creativity that I later took into business where I have started sixteen companies in the forty years since those days.?

Fast forward to today and with the advent of generative AI and the launch of ChatGPT, the world is rapidly changing. In just two short years the use of AI has gone from a relatively foreign concept for most, to the focus of most business conversations. Everywhere you look, you see it in use and in many cases to the detriment of the quality of creative content. Those that produce emails, texts, articles and posts with a simple prompt will often cut, paste and post this content with speed and efficiency. Much of this content pulls from creative works of others but it often does so in a way that feels very cookie cutter and certainly less than creative as it is really just an aggregation of prior ideas. In some cases it feels like creativity, but it is not. We need to keep in mind that the A in AI stands for artificial.?

True creativity will generate, develop and express new ideas is a uniquely human trait. The next iteration of AI that many are pushing towards is “AGI”, or artificial general intelligence.

Whenever this is reached, we will see the production of content, art and ideas that feels even closer to human creativity. AGI will be able to produce an end result that will be indistinguishable from something a human might create in many respects.?

So where is it all going as it pertains to creativity? Are humans going to be relegated to simply users and consumers of tech? I think the answer will be dependent on how we view and use technology. If we become heavily reliant on it and let it do all the heavy lifting creatively, the answer will probably be yes. If we choose to accept and use these tools as a new “baseline” for creative efforts, we will be able to achieve more than we ever thought possible and we will be able to create on levels never seen before.?

AI can be your new creative playground. One where the foundation is already high and you can build upon it. I certainly plan to use it this way and I hope you do too.