The Average Machine: Why AI Makes Human Creativity More Valuable, Not Less.

I'm getting married in 160 days. Last night, my fiancé and I could have talked about which songs we want the DJ to play, what story we want our officiant to tell, or who should sit with whom during the reception. Instead, we discussed the long-term macroeconomic and geopolitical effects of AI.

"AI has cracked creativity," she argued, "it can make people laugh, it can scare people — it can make people feel real emotions."

All of this is true. I'm positive that I've connected with, laughed at, or been scared by a video that was entirely AI-generated, and I didn't even know it.

But this made me think about the true definition of creativity and how the models of today cannot possibly be "creative." At their core, LLMs predict the most likely next token in a given conversation based on the vast amount of data from the internet that the model was trained on. Fundamentally, they are average outcome generators.

This does not fit the widely accepted definition of creativity: "the use of the imagination to create original ideas." However, when you combine an LLM with a human who is exercising their innate ability to create something that has never existed before, the opportunity and potential can reach new heights.

Creative people now have an ideation and iteration sidekick. These models mirror back any brand new ideas thought up by a human, and with their vast context of everything that has been created and written on the internet, they can help steer the human in the right direction to make their idea a reality.

In some cases, this has already gone too far. I was stumped when my fiancé asked, "If a song hits the top of the charts from a new artist with a 'human face', how would we ever know it's AI?" With products like Suno and Udio, people with zero musical talent can input a prompt and have a studio-quality song in minutes.

For myself, a musician, this cuts deep. If anyone can create a song that sounds far better than what I can write and record, what is the value in making music?

Then I thought about why I love the artists I listen to daily. It's because they are creating something that has never existed before — music that sounds and feels like nothing else.

When the underlying technology is an average outcome generator, you're always going to end up with average music — average both in quality and in sounding like everything else that's already been released.

This technology is only making the value of real human art increase. A painting that took weeks to complete, a song that has an imperfect guitar part, and an irregular bowl you buy at a maker's market are all examples of humans doing the difficult thing, which is exercising their creativity. In the age of AI slop, live shows, in-person displays, and real performances will be the only authentic ways to consume art.

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My fiancé and I ended that conversation the same way we usually do — without a clear answer, but thinking differently than when we started. That's what I keep coming back to.

Whatever you do for work, something is going to show up soon claiming it can do part of your job better and faster than you can. Maybe it already has. My honest advice is to try it — not because your boss will eventually make you, but because you'll learn something either way. If it falls flat, you'll know. If it actually works, you'll be the person who figured that out first.

But here's the thing I keep wanting to say out loud: the point was never to hand your ideas over to a machine. The same way I didn't stop writing songs when Auto-Tune showed up, the goal isn't to let the tool do the thinking. The goal is to use it the way I'd use a really well-read collaborator — someone who's heard everything, read everything, and can help you stress-test an idea, but who couldn't have come up with it on their own.

You can come up with things that have never existed. That's not a small thing. Start there, then open the chat window.

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"Beware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it's the way you've done it before." — Rick Rubin