No Resolutions, Just Reflection: Exploring What It Means to Be Creative in an AI World
I’m not one to make New Year's resolutions and won’t start the habit now, but since the change of the year is also a time for reflection on where we’ve been, I’m down for that. In one way or another, for most of last year, I was exploring the theme of artificial intelligence and its role in creativity.
What does it mean to be creative and to be a creator at a time when you can type a few words into an LLM and voila! Your idea is given form, at speed, like Venus appearing fully formed from sea foam?
It’s a weird departure from the analog tools of brush and paint, and even from the digital production user interfaces I’ve learned to unconsciously wield in my daily work. In a funny way, I feel like learning AI models and chat interfaces has made me a better writer, or at least a more concise one. You rarely get what you want from an LLM unless the prompts are precise and descriptive (and sometimes not even then!). It feels like there’s as much “art” and creativity to drafting an effective prompt as there is science.
Is this good or bad? I don’t have an answer. But it does bring me back to my art history classes and learning about how 19th-century Impressionist artists challenged the way art had always been done in the Paris Salon system. In so doing, they opened up a new world of creative possibilities: not just for artists, but for all who enjoy art.
Maybe the use of AI tools in creative work is just another way of expanding the boundaries of the status quo and will unlock unimagined possibilities, as it did back then. The optimist in me would like to think so, as long as creators whose work is used to train AI are fairly compensated for it.
So, no, no New Year’s resolutions from me, but I do believe 2026 will find me expanding experimentation of how AI technology can augment human creativity. See you there!
Contact Us →