Is AI Killing Creativity? Only If You Let It.

The drama around the next impending doom of civilizations advancement never stops.

Right now, its AI. Before that, it was the Industrial Revolution. The personal computer. Electric cars. Every time society evolves, a familiar fear shows up: not just concern about change, but grief over losing the world we recognize.

And instead of facing adaptation as a normal part of being human, we cling to the illusion that stability is the default.

Does AI kill creativityor just expose whats already happening?

The latest fear-mongering storyline I keep hearing is that AI will kill creative thinking.

To be fair, its not a totally baseless concern. If AI is writing everyones book reports, then yesrhetorical composition skills can atrophy. But I'm inclined to argue that the decline in writing and thinking skills is more strongly correlated with:

• Rising illiteracy (or functional illiteracy)

• A cultural decline in critical thinking

• Less practice with debate, reasoning, and forming arguments

AI didn't invent those problems. It's just the newest tool being blamed for them.

We've been educated out of creativity for decades

As Sir Ken Robinson famously argued, we've been educated out of being creative for a long time.

Children don't start out inhibited. They use imagination freelyuntil theyre taught to be self-conscious. Until theyre taught there's a right way to do things. Until cultural values are instilled that reward assimilation and group-think more than experimentation and originality.

And dualistic belief systems don't help either: right/wrong, pass/fail, smart/stupid, success/failure. When you train people to fear being wrong, you train them out of creativity.

The real issue: disinterest in learning (and the skills gap underneath it)

The deeper concern with students using AI to write homework assignments and take tests isnt the tool.

Its the disinterest in learning that those assignments are supposed to foster.

Or even more accurately: it's the already-prominent skills gap required for learning to happen in the first placereading comprehension, attention, reasoning, and the ability to struggle through uncertainty.

AI relies on data. But that data is always already in existence for it to draw from.

Someone has to create it, feed it, refine it, and validate it.

So the idea that AI is killing creativity feels misguided.

Creativity is a discipline. A muscle. Something we choose to engage.

AI isn't the scapegoat for self-imposed victimhood

Like any technology, AI can be exploitedand exploitation has consequences.

But we should be careful not to make AI the scapegoat for our own self-imposed victimhood.

Creativity isn't blocked by AI.

For some people, creativity is a core tenantan operating principle. It's not a hobby. It's how they choose to live.

Technology doesn't remove the skillit changes the context

Pre-made food doesn't stop us from cooking.

Buying clothes at the store doesn't stop us from learning to sew.

Computers don't stop us from writing with pen and paper.

Online banking didn't erase the core skill of managing moneyit just made it faster, easier, and scalable.

Our cognitive skills are ours to lose.

Technology mainly offers two things:

• Efficiency

• Scale

And those are not inherently moral or immoral. Theyre multipliers.

AI and creativity: a useful example from graphic design

Graphic design is often framed as a creative trade. But in many modern corporate settings, the practice is nearly devoid of creativity.

The game becomes:

• Create something to the specifications of leadership

• Dont provide your input (unless asked)

• Do it quickly

• Do it at scale

That tradeofftime vs. money vs. resourcesalready existed.

AI is simply aggregating and processing unstructured data at scale to produce solutions to already-solved problems. It's not creatively problem-solving on anyone's behalf.

When used appropriately, it can keep many of us from reinventing the wheel by making solutions more accessible than learning from a single book, a single source, or pure trial-and-error.

If graphic design has become uncreative in mass, that's a separate (and pre-existing) issue.

Why this matters: creativity is tied to independent thought

Creativity is part and parcel with independent thought.

Creativity:

• Leads to new solutions

• Questions old ways of doing things

• Encourages learning

• Expresses authenticity

And that's exactly why creativity threatens institutions of powerwhether those institutions are governments, corporations, cultural norms, or individuals who dont want to be unseated.

Creativity is often the outcome of critical thinking.

And critical thinking is the key to people acting on free will.

When fear-mongering positions us as victims of circumstancepowerless, dependent, and reactivewe're more likely to relinquish our agency to those who already hold power.

Is AI killing creativity? Here's the honest answer.

Only if you let it be.

Creativity comes from original thought.

So if you feel your ability to be creative is jeopardized by AI, it was going to be jeopardized by something else anyway.

The real question isn't whether AI will kill creativity.

The question is whether you'll keep choosing to practice it.