Will AI replace human creativity? We think the opposite.
AI made building cheap. It made knowing what to build priceless.
The big fear about AI is simple: it's coming for people's jobs. If a machine can write, design, code and produce in seconds, what's left for the human?
We think the evidence points somewhere more hopeful. AI is already triggering more creative, original work from humans, not less. We see it in our own workshop every week. And we've watched this film before.
What CGI taught us
Technically, CGI has never been better. It has also never been easier to spot. Not because your eye catches the pixels — your gut catches the blandness. Something reads as unreal even when you can't say why.
Compare eras. Toy Story blew people away in 1995. The latest instalments are technically superior in every measurable way, but nobody walks out asking how they did it. Jurassic Park's dinosaurs still hold up next to films made thirty years later with a hundred times the computing power. The technology improved. The awe went missing.
The reason is simple: the novelty wore off. When CGI was hard, only people with enormous passion attempted it, and every shot was a creative decision. When it became easy it became the default, poured over every scene because it was cheap. The shock of "how did they do that?" faded, and what remained was production.
AI content is speed-running the same curve. The astonishment phase is already over. People spot AI slop instantly now, in writing, in images, in music, the same gut-feel way they spot rubber-looking CGI. Generating something is no longer impressive, because everyone can.
Every tool that lowered the barrier released more creativity
This has happened many times before:
- The word processor didn't kill writing. It freed writers from retyping whole pages, and far more people wrote far more.
- Programming went from assembly to C to modern frameworks. Each layer did more of the work, and each layer meant more people building more ambitious software.
- Digital cameras removed the cost of film, and photography exploded.
Each time, the tool took the labour and the human kept the ideas. More people could express themselves, faster, and more finished work reached the world. AI is the same class of tool, applied to nearly everything at once.
When production is free, ideas are the whole price
There is an economic flip hiding in that story. When making things is hard, competence is valuable. When making things is easy, competence is worthless — everyone has it, at the press of a button. The only scarce thing left is a genuinely new idea, executed with care.
You can see it playing out already. The films that land now are the unexpected ones. Joker was made lean and personal against every franchise instinct and became a phenomenon, while technically flawless sequels struggle to be remembered a week later. Gaming is starker still: tiny, passionate teams routinely out-punch studios a thousand times their size, because the big pipeline optimised for polished sameness, and players can feel the difference between a game somebody needed to make and a game a spreadsheet approved.
That shift was underway before AI. AI is pouring fuel on it. Everything that was only ever production — the template product, the assembly-line sequel — is losing its price tag, because production is now nearly free. When a market stops paying for production, it starts paying for originality.
AI isn't replacing the human. It's replacing the copy-paste.
This is why we don't buy the "jobs-apocalypse" version of the story. For decades, most "creative" and technical work was actually production work: competent people executing known patterns. That is the layer AI is eating, and it was always going to be automated, because it was never where the human mattered.
AI can only remix what already exists. It doesn't want anything, and it hasn't lived through anything. The genuinely new idea, the taste to pick the right option from the hundred it offers, the detail that only comes from having been there — that stays human.
And because slop is so easy to spot, the market's appetite for that human layer is growing, not shrinking. The flood of generated content doesn't drown original work; it makes it stand out. People who use AI for speed and add their own ideas on top will run circles around the "AI-only producers" and the "AI-refusers" alike.
We see it in software every day
Our own trade is living proof. AI writes competent code at astonishing speed. We use it daily and wouldn't go back. Which is exactly why nobody will pay for competent code much longer. What clients pay for now is the part that was always scarce: understanding a business deeply enough to see the system it actually needs.
Last week we built an AI email checker for a support inbox. The AI typed the first draft in minutes. Thirty-five thousand unread emails broke that draft. We walked the flow through in our heads until we saw where it fell over; separating the fetching from the AI reading was the solution. Hand-written code would probably have carried the same bug — it just would have taken weeks to surface. With the AI typing, the problem arrived in hours, and a human solved it the same day.
AI made building cheap. It made knowing what to build priceless.
The oldest human trait there is
Creativity isn't a job that can be automated away. It's a drive. It fuels the spirit, feeds passion and wonder. We've been artists since the cave wall, and we've been building tools to express ourselves ever since. AI is just the newest tool.
More people creating. More ideas seeing daylight. More cave drawings.
Got an idea that doesn't look like anything on the market? Those are our favourite kind. Tell us about it.