Generative Artificial Intelligence, known as Gen AI, has been promised as a the holy grail of creative work — a solution to the torment of the blinking cursor on the blank screen.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are purported to help us be more prolific, more efficient, and more effective in our knowledge work and output.
The problem is that “churning out more content in less time” doesn’t necessarily promise quality. We already seem to be living in an era of peak AI slop.
On places like Substack, where more people seem care about the quality of the work they are sharing, I often see a sentiment along the lines of this:
I don’t want AI to do my creative work for me. I want AI to do my laundry, cook my meals, and do my errands so I have more time and energy for my creative work.
The allure of this is appealing: if we could only outsource all the stuff that ties up our time and energy, we could have more time for writing or creating.
This wish is based on a belief that the limiter to our creative output is time; if we only had more time, we could devote that time to our creative efforts and increase our output of quality work.
The problem with this belief is that it ignores the cognitive resources involved in creative work.
Here’s the reality: There’s only so much creative thinking a person can do in one day.
Creative knowledge work is cognitively expensive. Holding multiple ideas in your head, synthesizing those ideas, connecting dots, and determining how to articulate those ideas and connections demands a large expenditure of mental bandwidth.
Even if you had all day to spend on a creative project, your brain would be taxed before your time ran out.
The mundane tasks like making dinner or doing laundry may seem like they interfere with writing, but they actually are a crucial part of the creative process.
The fallacy is believing that creative work happens at the computer.
The truth is that what happens at the computer is only the end result of the creative process.
The best ideas rarely come when you’re sitting at your desk trying to force something.
They come while you’re doing other things — often rote, mundane things that don’t rely on cognitive bandwidth.
The mindlessness of folding laundry or making dinner allows your mind to wander. This is when your brain reflects on issues and creates the connections between ideas.
It turns out that the very things that you want AI to take away to free up your creativity are the things that can help your creative process, if you lean into them.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...