When ease rises, will creativity fall?

This prompt evokes a very strong thought on the recent trend of things especially with the rise and hike of AI. The question is will the use of AI stall human creativity?

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Well, in my opinion, I’d say that the emergence of AI is not a blow on human creativity but its definitely changes the rules of the creating games.

With time we have seen that every major advancement in technology has triggered this same worry. When photography was invented, we thought painting was going to die.

When calculator became common, we thought that we were going to loose mathematical thinking but in all these developments, we saw that creativity didn’t die rather creativity was shifted.

What we are seeing is another shift with Ai and not extinction. The real risk here is not that Ai creates things but that humans may stop trying to be deep in their creativity.

There’s a price for ease. When something becomes too easy or convenient, human may be tempted to avoid struggling and take the easy route.

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But we know that it’s in the face of struggles, trials, errors frustrations and etc that our creativity is better forged. If we rely on Ai blindly, our creativity will be weakened. Not because Ai exists but because we stopped exercising our creativity muscles.

But there’s another side to this. So we can actually expand our creativity. It can help someone who doesn’t have design skills to visualize an idea. It can help to speed up the time we spend on executing things so we can spend more time on thinking and strategizing.

So the question is not about whether technology is killing creativity rather it’s about how we are choosing to use technology.

These are ways we can stay creative:

• Stay the origin and do not be just an editor. We should not allow Ai do all the thinking for us. We can start our own ideas even if we don’t have it all figured out. We can use tools to refine our ideas and not replace our thinking.
• We should build taste and not just output because creativity is not just about production, it’s about judgement. The ability to say that this works and the other doesn’t is deeply human. Machines can generate options for us but taste comes from the experiences we live.
• We should intentionally embrace constrains and sometimes try to create something without AI. We can decide to write from scratch, design with fewer tools as these can helps us to sharpen our originality.
• We can choose to focus on story telling perspective. Ai can recreate patterns but it cannot live our lives. Our experiences, voices, cultures and our emotions are our creativity advantage. It’s makes our works unique.
• We can use Ai as a collaborator and not a crutch. We should see it as a fast and helpful assistant but not the visionary. We are still the director.

In fields like architecture. Machines helps to optimize structures and reduce costs but the soul of the designs, the emotions it evokes and the meaning behind is still from human intents.

Therefore our most powerful creations will be as a blend of human imaginations and the precision from machines. Therefore creativity isn’t dying, the real treat is the rise of passive consumption.