AI and Creativity: What Gets Lost in the Process

My twins are seven, which means our house currently contains approximately four hundred drawings of what I'm told are dragons but look, honestly, more like anxious dogs with wings. They are not good drawings. They are magnificent.

I've watched both of them hit that moment — the one where the crayon does something unexpected and they look up, surprised by themselves. Like they made something happen and weren't totally sure how. That look is not a minor thing. That look is the whole thing, actually. It's the click. The moment you realize you are a person who can make.

I've been thinking about that look a lot lately, because the question swirling through every corner of the creative world right now is whether AI changes what it feels like to get there — and whether "getting there" even means the same thing anymore.

The short version of the debate: AI tools are now capable enough that the line between human creative output and machine-assisted output has gotten genuinely blurry. This is not science fiction hedging. JSTOR Daily puts it plainly: AI's role in artistic creativity "surpasses simple automation" — it can generate novel ideas, enhance workflows, and open creative avenues that didn't previously exist. A research analysis published in Springer Nature's AI and Ethics journal found that AI accelerates workflows and introduces novel techniques that genuinely expand creative possibilities, while also raising serious concerns about originality and what role human creators actually play when the machine is doing more of the heavy lifting.

So: bigger toolbox, murkier ownership. That's where we are.

The optimistic framing — and it's not an unreasonable one — is that AI doesn't replace creativity, it relocates it. A piece in Forbes makes the case through the lens of creative director Ricardo Kuschnir, for whom AI's real value lies in rapid prototyping — letting creators imagine and iterate at a speed that was previously impossible. Kuschnir puts it directly: "Generative AI allows us to imagine, create, and show that another world is possible." The argument is that this moves creativity upstream, into the realm of concepts and vision rather than execution. You're still the one deciding what matters. The machine just helps you show it faster.

Researchers at UOC looked at the factors that influence whether generative AI gets folded into creative workflows and reached a similar conclusion — that this isn't the end of creative talent, but "an evolution towards a more strategic and conceptual role." Which sounds pretty good, until you sit with it long enough to ask: strategic and conceptual instead of what, exactly?

That's where the conversation gets uncomfortable for me.

Psychology Today ran a piece that I found harder to dismiss than I expected. The writer describes letting AI into their own writing process and finding that it changed things at the experiential level — not just what got produced, but what the act of producing felt like. The creative process, they write — "accompanying and nurturing, riding an idea from embryo to birth" — gets "infiltrated and fundamentally changed" the moment AI enters it. And a companion piece from the same publication goes further, arguing that AI has the power to "strip creativity of its awe factor" — that relying on it to "drive and direct our own imagination has real and profound consequences."

That word, "awe," is doing a lot of work there. And I think it's the right word.

There's a version of this debate that treats creativity as purely a matter of output — the thing you made, the product, the finished piece. By that measure, AI is an unambiguous win: more things, faster, at higher technical quality than most people could achieve alone. But there's another version of creativity that treats the experience of making as the whole point. The struggle and the surprise. The moment you didn't know what you were doing and then suddenly you did. The anxious dragon that turns out magnificent.

If you optimize away the friction, you might also be optimizing away the click.

I'm not arguing that AI is bad, or that using it makes you less of a creator, or that we should go back to — I don't know — making our own paintbrushes from scratch to keep things authentic. That way lies an insufferable conversation at a dinner party you didn't want to attend. And I'll note that the evidence genuinely doesn't settle this either way: the Springer analysis finds real creative expansion happening alongside the authenticity concerns, and the JSTOR framing treats AI integration as an opportunity for innovation, not a surrender.

But what I keep coming back to is the difference between a tool that serves your creative process and a tool that substitutes for parts of it you didn't realize were load-bearing. A camera doesn't replace the photographer's eye. A word processor doesn't replace the writer's judgment. Those are tools that handle execution while leaving the creative struggle intact. The question with generative AI is whether it fits that model, or whether — when you let it into the room early enough — it starts making the decisions that used to be yours.

For working creatives, this isn't abstract. The AI storyboarding tools already reshaping visual production pipelines represent exactly this tension in practical form: the tool solves a real problem (consistency, speed, iteration) while raising a real question (whose vision is being expressed when the machine is generating the frames?).

I don't have a clean answer. Nobody does yet. What I have is the memory of watching my kid look up from a drawing she didn't plan and realize she made it — and the low-grade worry that if she grows up in a world where the gap between "I want to make something" and "a thing exists" collapses entirely, she might never find out what she's actually capable of. Might never feel the specific surprise of doing something she wasn't sure she could do.

That's the thing I don't want to hand away. Not for her. Not for me, if I'm being honest about it.

The tools are going to keep getting better. The workflows are going to keep getting faster. The debate about copyright and authorship will drag through the courts for years. All of that is real and worth tracking. But underneath all of it is this smaller, harder question: what does it do to a person, over time, to have less and less direct contact with the difficulty of making things?

I genuinely don't know. And I'm not sure anyone who tells you they do is being straight with you.