Rediscovering Human Creativity in the Age of AI

Here’s a framework to keep you balanced in this generative AI age. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself yearning to rediscover the joy in what makes creativity uniquely human.

Here’s what I came up with.

First, rid yourself of any social pressures you feel to “keep up” or that your creative job is somehow going to be taken by an AI. It’s not.

Now, break up your creative process into separate pieces. Whatever that means for you. Maybe your process is a series of steps, such as idea generation, discernment, evaluating, testing, iterating… whatever that may be for you.

Then, ask yourself:

1. Which part(s) of the process light me up?
2. Which part(s) of the process, if eliminated, would let me do more of #1?

Maybe you hate revising for structure, so that’s the part where you integrate some AI, such as Grammarly, ChatGPT or Claude.

But maybe you actually love idea generation. You keep a notebook on you at all times to write down interesting things you notice so you can incorporate these things into your creative work later.

Clearly, AI is not appropriate for that part of the creative process. That part is functionally satisfying for you.

And despite the fact that you could, if you wanted to, tell ChatGPT to give you 10 ideas for a dark rom-com set in 1970s LA, you’d rather experience the fun of that reflective and dynamic eureka moment when you come up with a world-changing idea using nothing but your wetware.

Meanwhile, your office mate dreads facing the blank page. For them, Generative AI is an unlock.

Relying on AI for all the parts of the process might produce emotionally cold results. A TV script that sounds like Aaron Sorkin is novel and impressive, but an actual Aaron Sorkin script is the one that will bring a viewer to tears.

It’s one way to operate. Humanize the parts of the process you love and outsource the parts you don’t.