08/26/2026
# # Let’s Make It Clear: Creativity & AI
I've been using AI for roughly five years now, starting pretty damn close to its public inception.
A lot of people have had a lot to say about AI. And that's fair. We're watching an entirely new era of human capability unfold in real time.
But I'd like to make something clear about creativity and the use of AI.
People who dig ditches use shovels.
They also use backhoes.
One is a handheld tool. The other is heavy machinery.
Nobody looks at a backhoe and says, *"Well, that's cheating. A real ditch should take three days and a shovel."*
We've been doing this with computers for decades.
Computers are tools. Some are simple tools. Some are extraordinarily powerful tools. We've used them to design buildings, compose music, make movies, engineer machines, build businesses, create art, write books, explore ideas, and construct an enormous portion of the world we live in.
A desktop computer is a tool.
A supercomputer is machinery.
The existence of more powerful machinery doesn't eliminate the person operating it.
And that's where I think the conversation about AI gets confused.
I've seen people equate using AI with having a stifled creative mind. As though the moment you use a machine to help create something, the creativity somehow belongs to the machine instead of the person who envisioned it.
I don't see it that way.
For the last five years, I've been learning how to interact with these systems—not just how to ask them for things, but how to communicate ideas to them, direct them, correct them, push them, combine them with other tools, and turn vague thoughts into something tangible.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing AI as a replacement for creativity.
I started seeing the blueprints for an entirely new creative world.
Not a world where everything the old one gave us disappears.
A world where we take what we already had and give people dramatically more ways to build with it.
The shovel didn't kill the ditch.
The computer didn't kill creativity.
The camera didn't kill painting.
The synthesizer didn't kill music.
And AI isn't going to kill imagination.
It's another tool.
A fu***ng enormous one, admittedly.
But still a tool.
What gets built with it is going to depend on the person holding the reins.
