Can AI be truly creative? It's a question that divides philosophers, technologists, and artists alike. Whether human creativity emerges from neural processes or something more transcendent is a debate worth having — but it risks distracting us from a more immediately useful question: how does AI fit into our creative lives right now?
My answer is that we need a deliberate distinction between two categories of creative work — and we need to treat them very differently.
Fields Worth Protecting
Journalism, photography, visual art, poetry, music — these fields are vital to our humanity. They lift our spirits, challenge our assumptions, and enrich our lives in ways that go beyond mere function. They deserve protection from wholesale AI replacement, not because AI cannot approximate their outputs, but because the human process of creating them matters.
There's something irreducible about a photograph taken by someone who chose that moment, that angle, that light — because of something they felt. The technical output might be replicable. The act of making it is not.
The question is not whether AI can create. It's whether we want to live in a world where only AI does.
Where AI Genuinely Helps
But there's a vast category of creative work that isn't art — it's communication. Emails, proposals, presentations, reports, internal memos, social media updates. These need to be clear and competent, but they don't need to be expressions of human soul. Treating them as if they do is a misallocation of precious creative energy.
Consider a nonprofit whose team spends hours each week perfecting donor correspondence. That time — and the mental energy it consumes — could be redirected entirely toward the mission those donors are funding. AI handles the correspondence. Humans handle the work that only humans can do.
That's not a compromise. That's a better allocation of the most valuable resource any organisation has.
The Balance Worth Finding
The creative challenge of our moment isn't about AI versus humans. It's about identifying which creative acts belong in which category — and having the discipline to treat them accordingly.
Use AI to clear the decks. Protect the space that matters. And ask, honestly, how AI can enhance your life and work without diminishing the essence of what makes your creative contribution yours.
That balance looks different for everyone. But finding it is the work.