I ask myself ... What happens to our ability to create when we no longer go through the process of creating things ourselves? Well ... I’m 60 years old. I belong to a generation that learned to make things ourselves — slowly, sometimes awkwardly, and with a surprising number of mistakes. And I do have my perspective in today’s discussion about artificial intelligence. We didn’t have generative AI that could produce a design, a piece of text, an image, or an idea in seconds. We had to start — Then fail — Then start again.
Creativity Takes Time
The British comedian and writer John Cleese has spent a lot of time thinking about creativity. One of his key ideas is that creative people need an open, playful space where they can experiment.
Playing doesn’t mean being unproductive. It means trying things without immediately knowing whether they will work. Allowing an absurd idea. Following a bad idea. Trying something that probably won’t work.
And SURPRISE! ... sometimes discovering that this is exactly where something interesting begins.
Cleese describes this as an open mode of thinking. It is different from the closed, goal-oriented mode we use when we need to make decisions and get things done. We need both. But if we move into solution mode too quickly, we may lose something important: the time to explore. And this is where AI becomes really interesting.
AI is incredibly good at giving us a solution before we have had enough time to explore the problem ourselves.
What Photoshop Already Changed
I remember how digital tools changed design. Photoshop was a revolution. And of course, a great one.
Suddenly, we could correct things, move them, copy them, undo them, and change them over and over again. Something that used to be destroyed could simply be restored. But even back then ... at some point I started wondering: What are we no longer learning because we no longer have to do it ourselves?
When you draw something by hand, you learn to see differently.
When you have to start a design over and over again, you develop a different understanding of form, proportion, and decision-making.
When something doesn’t work and you can’t simply hit “Undo,” you have to figure out why it doesn’t work.
The detour becomes part of the learning. Photoshop didn’t make that process disappear. But it started to remove some of the friction. Generative AI takes this much further.
And Now Comes AI
Photoshop, Figma u name it ... helped us design faster. AI can now take over parts of the design process itself.
- It writes text.
- It creates images.
- It develops concepts.
- It generates variations.
- It formulates ideas.
And it can even explain why those ideas are supposedly good. That is fascinating. And scary. And fascinating.
But it is also why I think we should be careful when we talk about AI mainly in terms of productivity. I think ... The real question is not: “How much work can AI take away from us?”
It is: “What work should we perhaps not give away at all?”
The Value of the Detour
A young designer who gets a task today and can generate ten variations with AI within seconds clearly has a huge advantage. But what about the hours earlier generations might have needed to develop those ten variations themselves? Those hours were not simply working hours.
- They were learning.
- They were practice.
- They were observation.
- They were frustration.
- They were accidents.
- They were mistakes.
And I keep saying it — because it is true: We often learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. So what happens if we remove the learning, the practice, the observation, the frustration, the unexpected discoveries, and the mistakes? Maybe we are also removing one of the most important parts of the creative of the learning process. We should not confuse working time with learning time.
That distinction becomes especially important for children, teenagers, students — and young designers. Imagine a student who is asked to write an essay and ChatGPT produces an amazingly good text within seconds. The result may be much better than what the student could have written alone.
- But did the student learn how to develop an idea?
- Did they learn how to build a structure?
- Did they learn how to write a bad first paragraph and then make it better?
- Did they learn how to develop their own voice?
- Or did they simply learn how to give the machine the right instructions?
Those are very different skills.
The Dangerous Moment Is Not the Final Result
Maybe this is one of the biggest challenges for education and design. We usually judge the result.
- A beautiful image.
- A good piece of writing.
- A convincing presentation.
- A working website.
But creativity doesn’t only happen in the final result. It happens on the way there. And we are seeing less and less of that journey. If a student uses AI to create an excellent essay, you may not be able to tell from the finished document that some of the actual thinking never happened. The result can be better than the learning process. And that is where I see the danger.
I’m Not Saying We Should Ban AI - not at all, Ai is fascinating and I love
I’m not arguing that we should ban AI from schools, universities, or design studios. That would probably be just as unrealistic as trying to remove Photoshop from design. AI is here to stay. And it will be an incredibly powerful tool. But perhaps we need new rules for how we use it. Not everything that can be automated should be automated.
- Maybe a design student should first develop an idea without AI.
- Maybe a student should write a text themselves before asking a machine to improve it.
- Maybe a sketch should first be drawn by hand.
- Maybe there should be assignments where mistakes are not only allowed, but actually encouraged.
Not because the old methods are better. But because through these methods, we learn something a machine cannot teach us ... how to come up with an idea ourselves.
For me, this is also a UX question. We constantly talk about User Experience in technology. But maybe we need to start thinking about something else: Learning Experience.
When we design products that make more and more decisions for us, we should ask ourselves what experiences the user no longer gets to have. A system that takes a young designer straight to a perfect result may offer an excellent User Experience. But it might provide a poor Learning Experience.
Maybe we need to separate these two things much more carefully in the future. Because a system can make our lives easier while also making us less capable. And perhaps this is one of the most interesting challenges for UX: How do we design AI systems that help people without taking away the experiences through which people become better at what they do?
The Most Important Job of AI
John Cleese’s ideas about creativity lead to a surprisingly relevant question. If creativity needs space to play, maybe we will need to deliberately create spaces where AI doesn’t immediately step in.
For detours.
For boredom.
For making things by hand.
For trial and error.
For the five minutes when you simply don’t have an answer yet.
Maybe we even need to teach young people again that it is perfectly okay not to be good at something right away. Because that is exactly where learning begins. AI can take an incredible amount of work off our shoulders.
It can challenge us.
It can expand what we are capable of.
But there is one thing we should not hand over too easily: the journey that makes us creative ourselves. Because maybe the greatest value of a bad first idea is not the idea itself. Maybe it is simply the fact that we came up with it ourselves.
And maybe this is where Monty Python can help us one last time.
John Cleese once said, “If you want to be creative, allow yourself to be stupid.” Maybe that is exactly what we need to protect in the age of AI: the freedom to be stupid for a while.
To have a bad idea.
To make something that doesn’t work.
To ask a completely ridiculous question.
Before asking AI to give us the perfect answer. Because sometimes the stupid idea is where the interesting one begins. And if nothing else works: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! š
So maybe the future of creativity needs a little less perfection. A little more playing. A few more bad ideas. And occasionally, a completely pointless five-minute detour. John Cleese would probably approve. Or perhaps he would simply say: “And now for something completely different.”
And honestly — that might be exactly what creativity needs. š
Comments
Post a Comment