I recently overheard a conversation between two startup founders. One was excitedly showing the other how they'd used AI to generate their entire pitch deck, website copy, social media strategy, and even design mockups for their early stage endeavor. "It’s doing critical thinking for me. I haven't had to think creatively in weeks," they laughed. The other founder nodded approvingly, "That's efficiency!"
Is it though?
As someone who's spent my entire career questioning my skills, pushing to learn how to think strategically and refining my design skills, this exchange made me pause.
Are we witnessing the slow death of human creativity, or are we standing at the threshold of a new creative renaissance?
This question isn't just philosophical—it has practical implications for everyone building digital products today.
I've heard many say, "Kids today don't need to know anything. They just need to ask the right AI for answers." While I agree our educational systems need to evolve, this perspective is dangerously oversimplified.
For years and years, teachers have always had the responsibility for consuming information, digesting it, connecting it with adjacent knowledge, and transmitting it compellingly. For the first time, a non-human entity can do this with virtually unlimited access to information in no time.
But here's the paradox: while AI gives us unprecedented access to knowledge, it might simultaneously reduce our incentive to deeply internalize that knowledge. And without internalized knowledge, can we truly create?
Why Technical Skill Still Matters
Consider this: Is improvement even possible without skill? Can creativity truly flow without knowledge?
A music teacher once told me something I'll never forget: "Improvisation is just mixing things and patterns you've already learned, but in ways that respond to the context you're in. If you think about it, you are mixing your knowledge with context and your taste, and magic can happen."
These words apply to every discipline. For example, problem-solving requires improvisation—the ability to dive into your knowledge base and respond to your environment, future-thinking needs you to evaluate the past to paint plausible worlds ahead, painting requires to understand how colors are perceived and how the material interacts with the brush and the canvas in order to express a message.
This mixture of knowledge, context and expression is found everywhere and feeds many creative activities.
When we delegate our knowledge to AI, we risk losing the mental models that power innovation.
A study published by Springer Nature on June 17, 2024, analyzed data from 285 students in Pakistan and China, finding that 68.9% showed increased “laziness” (reduced effort in learning) and 27.7% had degraded decision-making skills due to overreliance on AI dialogue systems like ChatGPT.
The AI can indeed do a good job—perhaps better than many humans in certain contexts. But it lacks your unique perspective, your specific experiences, your intuition developed through years of practice.
The challenge isn't avoiding AI—it's choosing which skills deserve your focused attention and determining how deeply to learn them.
Finding that sweet spot, while leveraging AI tools to fill specific gaps, is the new creative equilibrium we must all discover.
AI's capabilities come with notable limitations we can't ignore:
- AI hallucinations can present false information as true
- Confirmation bias can skew our judgment after reading AI-generated content
- Overreliance can diminish our drive to learn independently
- Delegating the wrong tasks can impair our ability to think and execute
A good example is “Zillow”, a real estate tech startup that used AI algorithms to predict home prices and power its iBuying program, buying homes directly from sellers.
The platform’s Zestimates promised precision, but pricing a home—subjective, nuanced, and often requiring a ‘you have to see the ceiling crack’ instinct—wasn’t ready to be fully delegated to AI.
After the Pandemic hit, the AI failed to adapt to rapid market changes, and human oversight was insufficient, causing models to overpay for hundreds of homes (93% of Phoenix homes in one quarter, according con CNN).
A human could have leveraged “knowledge, context and taste” and use common sense to act on what was happening, but this shows how overtrusting AI can affect a startup’s strategy.
In November 2021, Zillow shut down its iBuying unit, laying off 25% of its workforce (about 2,000 employees), and taking a $569 million write-down.
This story can act as a vivid warning for CEOs about commoditizing their judgment, but instead of being taken as reasons to avoid AI—they're reasons to use it wisely.
Instead of prompting an AI with a problem and expecting a complete solution, think of AI as a superpower layer that elevates your output:
- Use AI as a researcher, gathering information from diverse sources
- Employ it as a sparring partner during ideation and content generation
- Let it serve as an interpreter for extracting insights from large datasets
- Utilize it as a teacher, improving your grammar or enhancing your writing with additional data
“The key is augmentation of your capabilities, not replacement of your judgment.”
We're facing unprecedented unpredictability in the creative and technical fields. To navigate this new reality:
- Be strategic about your AI usage—choose tools that enhance rather than replace your unique perspective, taste, and judgment
- Stay adaptable and responsive to change while remaining true to your creative instincts
- Consider becoming a knowledgeable generalist with medium expertise across multiple domains
This approach provides the flexibility and foundational knowledge needed to pivot as technology continues to evolve.
The next time you're tempted to delegate writing an important email to an AI, ask yourself: Is this communication where my voice needs to be heard?
If yes, write it yourself, even if it takes longer.
Using AI carelessly can lead to unwanted consequences: behavioral changes, overreliance on AI-generated "truths," diminished motivation to grow, fear of working without technological assistance, constant second-guessing, and eventually, the commoditization of your unique value.
Perhaps the most human skill in an AI-saturated world is knowing when to put the technology aside and trust your own creativity. After all, the tools should serve the creator, not the other way around.
What creative tasks are you protecting from automation? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
