Most people on LinkedIn seem obsessed with using AI to make more, faster. The more interesting question (I feel) is what we use the “freed up” time for...

Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Jacqueline Ng Lane distinguishes two areas in which AI impacts creative work:

1. 1.Automation (of creative output)
2. 2.Amplification (of creative capacity)

Creative output is about producing or realising more, faster, by fully or semi-automating the less cognitively demanding, high-volume, repeatable tasks.

Creative capacity sits at the other end: complex, cognitively deep work, where AI is used to enhance specific human capabilities, like judging competing options or exploring novel solutions to a problem.

We’ve all heard “AI won’t take your job, someone using AI will” a million times. But what does “using” actually mean here? Using AI for automation alone falls short, in my opinion.

I’d put it differently: drawing a clear line between AI automation and AI amplification, and investing strategically in both, will most likely be beneficial in the coming years.

Where would you draw this line? Which parts of your professional life get in the way of your core practice or passion and could benefit from automation? And which parts could be deepened, sharpened, amplified?

I’ve been building tools and systems to automate much of what I broadly consider “painful admin” and “scary bureaucracy”.

At the same time I’m continuously working on expanding my own creative capacity in three major areas so far:

1. Input

Systems to farm, diversify and increase the quality of my creative inputs. Better input usually results in better output. The “raw material” I work with every day (whether that’s a line from a theatre play, a TouchDesigner workflow, or the colour theme of a Moroccan market) thus plays a crucial role in what I can come up with.

2. Connections

Systems for making connections between the seemingly separate. In my personal definition, creativity is the weaving and reassembling of connections, the making of networks. Leveraging AI to help me combine the ideas and materials inside my growing database of stuff has proven very fruitful so far...

3. Provocation

Systems that provoke my (lateral) thinking. Letting go of preconceived patterns and seeing a thing from as many angles as possible is a core aspect of creative making. AI helps me expose my biases and assumptions about how something is or should be (many of which I wasn’t even aware of) on a daily basis now. Imagine discussing the meaning and usage of a teacup-like object with an alien – hell yeah.

None of these systems makes me faster. Nor do they necessarily help me put out “more”. But so far, they often lead to more unusual ideas that lay the foundation for more interesting concepts...

What are your ways of expanding your creative capacity?

We are the most enabled generation of creators the world has ever seen.

Until recently (literally just a few years ago) the vast majority of a creative’s time and energy went into:

CRAFTING THE THING.

After you had the idea, the concept, the vision, you still had to execute it. Hands-on. Produce it. Realize it. Pre-AI, pre-automation, this execution phase often consumed 90% of the project.

And while that’s still true in some cases, the distribution between envisioning and realizing has been shifting for decades.

Think about what it used to take to create.

Disney’s Snow White in 1937 required 750 artists over the course of three years hand-drawing 24 frames for every second of a total of 83 minutes (with several attempts and versions) – resulting in hundreds of thousands of individual drawings. Soon, any Sora user can generate visually comparable animation sequences in minutes without having to understand anything about perspective, composition, lighting, colors and all the rest.

The Beatles spent 700 hours recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Today, a single artist can produce, mix and master an album-quality track in one afternoon on a MacBook.

• A film edit that used to take six months now likely takes six weeks.
• A brand identity that took a month now takes a week.
• A website that took three days now takes three hours.

As the technical barriers to execution degrade, realizing ideas becomes easier and more accessible to everyone. AI has accelerated this shift into hyperdrive.

And no, that’s not only a good thing... The internet is already drowning in the downsides of this transformation.

But still: We are the most enabled generation of creators the world has ever seen.

What do we use this power for? Making everything look like Studio Ghibli? How boring is that?

Where are the AI-enabled creations that:

• break the patterns rather than repeating them?
• make people uncomfortable in productive ways?
• illuminate direction rather than cloud it?

When do we stop producing what we were already producing before AI? And when do we start making more of what AI can’t come up with?

What do you think? What will still matter — or matter even more — in creative work ten years from now?

When AI can generate anything instantly, then “crafting the thing” becomes optional. This fundamentally changes what it means to be a creative.

Last year, Disney gave OpenAI access to 200+ of its most iconic characters, from Mickey Mouse to Marvel heroes, for use in AI tools like Sora.

In other words: Decades of carefully refined craftsmanship just became available to anyone with an OpenAI account.

While this is a drastic example, it clearly shows the reality many creatives are facing right now.

We’re entering a world where:

• output will be instant.
• the technical knowledge needed to produce professional-looking work will drop to near-zero.
• anyone can digitally realize whatever comes to mind.

“Crafting the thing” (editing an image, changing a design, animating a character, mixing a soundtrack, writing copy, coding a prototype) no longer necessarily (!) requires significant time or specialized skill.

And as this massive part of the creative process shrinks to a fraction of the capacity it once consumed, time, effort, and value are forced to shift to the other part:

Envisioning things.

Does this make creatives obsolete?

Not at all. But it redefines what creatives do, how they do it, and what role they must take…

Exploring, processing and interpreting the world is an inherently and thoroughly human trait.

Externalizing this process to AI means weakening a connection between us and our “making”, us and ourselves, us with each other and us with the rest of the living world.

I believe that without this connection, without this process, creativity as we know it isn’t really possible.

Creativity is not a result. It’s how you get to it. The path of the creator towards it. The resonance of a unique pile of biomass and lived experience with an entity of interest in a given context.

Throughout this process, you inevitably add something of yourself to the work. And that’s essential. In commercial projects this something might be a bit more subtle. In independent, more artistic ones, it might be more prominent.

But there is always a YOU in what you do. And that’s what makes it interesting.

AI cannot “get in touch” with something for you. It cannot “inhabit” your work for you. Nothing can. Whether that work is a text, a design, music or just a thought.

Creative work that remains “untouched” by its creator is just an empty gesture – “slop” that stands in the way of what is worth our attention.

And people aren’t stupid. I think that every human being can sense whether a work has roots or not.

So instead of thinking only about how to bypass it, we should ask how AI can intensify and expand the creative process.

• How can we learn and discover more deeply, broadly or specifically, and feed ourselves with the things that inspire us?
• How can we extract, segment, transform and utilize creative source material in new ways?
• How can we combine all of this in unprecedented forms? How can we find associations and analogies that enable new perspectives on familiar things?
• How can we challenge our assumptions, recognize and let go of preconceived concepts and biases, to approach projects more unconventionally and innovatively?
• How can we find and sharpen our own distinct language and create a better sense of our own connection, our own role in our projects?

The possibilities for empowering the creative process of a self-thinking, self-feeling human with the very non-human capabilities of AI are virtually endless.

Personally, I have no doubt that we’re standing at the foot of a creative renaissance that – given we don’t mess it up beforehand – will bring forth humanity’s most fascinating ideas.

Thinking is expensive. Our brain accounts for only 2% of our body’s weight while consuming around 20% of its energy.

On a millennia-old quest to spare brain energy wherever possible – and tackle ever more complex challenges along the way – we’ve successfully outsourced our sense of time to clocks, our prospective memory to calendars, and simple math to calculators.

Spelling and grammar is now mostly handled through auto-correct, and every little piece of human knowledge can be easily recalled via the internet.

We don’t have to know where we are, as long as Google Maps is by our side. In fact we don’t have to know where anything is, since tracking and smart tags are a thing...

The price: just like muscles shrink if unused, certain cognitive abilities degrade as well, if offloaded to something else.

The upside (that we can more or less successfully tell ourselves) is that offloading the mundane frees us up for what really matters, that we’re essentially extending our minds beyond the skull.

So instead of constantly having to think about street names, intersections and house numbers on the way to the cinema, we can think about dinosaurs or gnocchi – or both (after all, you can never devote enough brain energy to these two).

The trouble starts when we offload not just street names, intersections and house numbers, but dinosaurs, gnocchi, and everything else too...

With AI, that’s possible now. Sure, chatbots are still unpredictable in many ways. And sure, reality and the massively overhyped tech-bro-Silicon-Valley-AI-narrative of human equivalent agents are still far apart.

But the spectrum of cognitive effort that could theoretically be outsourced to AI seems virtually endless.

We’ve all heard about the MIT study showing students writing essays with ChatGPT resulted in significantly lower brain engagement and weaker neural connectivity than those writing without AI assistance. And it doesn’t end with writing essays, summarizing documents or doing simple research...

• Why not ask AI what to wear today? What to cook today? What to speak about with your partner?
• Why not let it decide which job offer to accept? Which apartment to rent? Whether to end a relationship?
• Why not outsource your political opinions, your parenting decisions, your career path?
• Why not ask AI how you should feel about something – or what you should want in the first place?

Why not “offload”... MOST cognitive efforts... and become a Wall-E-like grown-up toddler floating through a world of total effortlessness?

Externalize too much and you become unable to evaluate situations, form opinions, and make decisions...

In Wall-E, the remnants of human civilization on a spaceship literally handed over all decision-making power to the AI steering wheel “Auto”, which, as it would later turn out, didn’t always act in humanity’s best interest...

As Advait Sarkar in his recent TED Talk perfectly puts it: “Outsourcing thinking takes us one step closer to outsourcing responsibility.”

And even though we’re far from perfect at taking responsibility for each other or the planet, outsourcing that responsibility entirely would be absurd...

I’m starting a blog on HUMAN creativity in the age of AI – on the question, what and how creatives will “make” in a not so distant future, when anyone can prompt a full-length action movie with a few, chaotic lines of spoken word.

Do we all have to get much... better... at what we do? Faster? Do we have to create... more? Will AI help us to explore, process and interpret new layers of reality? Of ourselves? Or will we gradually move towards a future, in which all thinking, all creative “making” is externalised, in which our sole purpose is to passively consume... stuff?

Right now, AI uses large amounts of human “making” to “humanise” itself, while many humans use AI to do the opposite.

I want to believe that we’ll find ways not to mindlessly bypass and shelve ourselves, but to meaningfully and excessively deepen the human experience, to intensify the creative process, and to expand our capabilities of “making” in the most fascinating ways.

It needs more conversation about the near but not immediate future, when “human-made” becomes a category... among others. And instead of letting our AI agents bombard each other with generic clickbait bullshit and blindly running from the fear of being “left behind,” we could make this a TIY (think it yourself) conversation again, in which soul, authenticity, and genuine clarity triumph over empty, noisy sameness.

I want to contribute to this conversation. And maybe you do too...

I’ll write about:

• what to automate... and what to “unautomate”.
• why I have no doubt that AI will be more “creative” than us… and why human creativity will become even more essential nonetheless.
• the systems, setups, guardrails, and scenarios in which AI can nurture, deepen, sharpen and expand the creative process of real people, instead of overriding their unique perspective on the world.
• the tool I’m building to achieve this...
• “meta-making” in an age of liquid content and democratized digital skills.
• learning beautiful and weird new stuff. Making beautiful and weird new stuff.
• becoming AI-augmented and “hyper-authentic”, while staying connected to each other, to nature, and to meaning amid all this chaos...