AI is not the Chicxulub Impactor

In the privacy of my own site, I’m going to make an uncomfortable argument:

As creatives, we’ve long complained that too much of our job wasn’t actually creative. Too many meetings. Too much process. Too many decks. Too much formatting. Too much of the machinery pulling us away from the work itself.

We said we wanted more time to think and experiment and follow strange ideas.

Then AI shows up and removes a lot of the friction that keeps us from doing that. And suddenly many of us are asking for the friction back.

I understand why. Some jobs will change. Some parts of the process will disappear. Some forms of expertise will compress. That part feels very real and very scary.

But I like to think it’s more disruption than a dinosaur-extinction meteor strike. I like to think that retouchers will become prompt engineers and visual directors. Creatives who once spent days building decks, hunting references and stitching things together will spend more time shaping ideas.

Now it’s pretty easy to create a rough film. Or a deck. Or even the outline of a strategic framework or prototype of an app. Things that once required process increasingly just require initiative. That’s not a small shift.

But it makes me wonder whether part of our fear is that we may finally get what we asked for. Because for many Creative people, the real bottleneck was never execution.

It was translation. And discipline.

Half of creative work involved laying track: explaining references, organizing fragments, connecting ideas that didn’t obviously belong together, and defending leaps that felt obvious in your own head but weren’t yet obvious in the room.

The other half involved talking yourself out of ideas before they ever had a chance.

Got an interesting thought? Great. Now build a deck. Find references. Mock it up. Pull strategy in. Get production involved. Justify the time.

Most ideas didn’t die because they were bad; they died from activation energy.

And even before all that, there’s another tax: compression. Creative minds don’t move in straight lines. They jump. They leave breadcrumbs. They see implications, strange references, and half-formed possibilities that don’t yet know what they are.

And you lose things. Not because they weren’t important but because you have to keep moving.

AI changes that too. You don’t lose the loose threads. You can say: hold onto this weird thing for a minute and come back later. Tell me what this thought means in conjunction with that one. Do the boring part of mapping it all out so I can focus on the fun creative bit.

Now, it’s so easy to go bounding across virgin creative territory. Not because AI thinks for you or because it replaces judgment. If anything, judgment becomes more valuable.

What it changes is the distance between thoughts. And that’s when magic really happens.