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Human creativity is messy. It's tangled. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
It happens inside of us. And it happens between us. In exchange, friction, argument, contradiction. In the moment someone says something you didn't expect. In the moment you realize your first idea was too shallow or your entire work was rubbish. I’m sure it’s happened to you, too?
Think of any creative exchange that has helped you grow. And I don’t mean your latest banter with your best AI buddy. Real people talk. Maybe a few years ago you saw that, in my opinion, super-exciting Beatles documentary. In it, we get behind-the-scenes glimpses of legendary music productions, into situations and environments where creativity is born or refined.
Sure, these are heavily curated and edited glimpses. But what’s brilliant about it is that you hear the real Beatles—the people!—talking and arguing. You hear the struggle. Yet it is precisely this struggle that disappears when creative work becomes a dialogue with a large language model.
And it is precisely this deeply human experience that is currently being systematically optimized away. I call this: the three shots fired at creativity.
Shot 1: Over-processification. We’re replacing the struggle for creative excellence with polished rituals.
Shot 2: Artifact obsession. We confuse output with creativity. Generative AI makes this even more seductive.
Shot 3: Extreme short-circuiting. We keep cutting the creative process shorter and shorter, and then wonder why nothing new is happening.
Generative AI isn’t the source of this decades-long trend. It’s the current technological and cultural amplifier. One prompt, BAM, a pile of text. One prompt, BAM: image, song—whatever. I’ve tried it all, from Suno to Nano Banana. It might feel like creativity because GenAI produces so much concrete, ready-made output. But output isn’t the journey. And the journey is the whole point of the story, isn’t it?
The other night at the Oscars, Conan O’Brien said on stage:
“I am Conan O’Brien, the last human host of this event. ”
That’s funny, but it also shows the radical transformation we’re in the midst of, especially in the creative industries (also known as the creative economy).
I’m not going to turn this into some grand theory. I’ll be writing down my thoughts over the next few weeks, one shot at a time.
Next up is the first shot: Over-processualization ✌.
Wishing you a sunny week full of creative discoveries, big and small.
– Matthias
Image courtesy of LA Gun Club