After AI, What Is Creativity For?

AI

When creation becomes cheap, meaning becomes everything.

For centuries, creative work was defined by effort.

You needed years of practice to paint well, equipment to record music, editors to publish writing.

Creation was slow, costly, and therefore rare.

Today, a machine can produce a convincing song, image, or essay in seconds. The shock is not that AI can create. It is that creation itself has stopped being impressive.

This is the quiet crisis facing creative work now. Not extinction, but dilution.

When everything can be made, what is worth making?

AI did not kill creativity. It flooded it. The internet is now a firehose of competent work. Good enough images. Fine music. Acceptable writing.

The problem is no longer access to creation, but navigation through it.

In this environment, technical skill loses its edge.

The advantage shifts to those who can decide what matters, what resonates, and what should exist at all.

Let’s simplify that. Creativity moves from execution to judgment.

AI is an extraordinary accelerator. It compresses time, removes friction, and expands possibility. But it does not choose a point of view. It does not feel embarrassment, obsession, fear, or conviction.

The most interesting creators are already adjusting.

They use machines to generate options, then apply human taste to shape them. Less time making. More time editing, rejecting, refining. Let’s simplify that.

The human role becomes direction, not production.

The deeper fear is not that art will disappear, but that artists will.

When supply explodes, prices fall. When prices fall, fewer people can afford to do the work seriously. Platforms benefit from scale. Creators absorb the instability.

This is the uncomfortable truth. AI does not devalue creativity as a concept. It devalues it as a job.

Let’s simplify that. Culture still needs creators, but markets may not support them in the same way.

Every creative era has a reckoning moment.

Photography forced painters to ask why they painted. Recorded music forced musicians to ask what performance meant. AI now forces a similar question.

If making is easy, why make anything at all?

The only honest answer is that creativity was never about output. It was about saying something that only you could say.