Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we’ve misunderstood creativity.

Not as a skill… not as a profession… but as a state of being.
Somewhere along the way, creativity (and I’m speaking only to creativity in the business sense) became something we produced instead of something we inhabited.
A deliverable… a metric… a slot in a content calendar.
Make something… ship it… measure it… and repeat.

That shift felt efficient… but now it feels more like a flattening.

I was thinking about this while editing my conversation with David “Shingy” Shingy (many will remember him by his title, Digital Prophet) on this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel.
Not because we were talking about AI in a tactical sense (there is that).
But because everything he was saying kept pointing back to a truth I had buried somewhere in the past…

Creativity doesn’t start with output… it starts with presence.

Before there’s an idea… there’s something that grabs attention.
Before there’s a concept… there’s a curiosity… an itch.
Before there’s anything worth sharing… there’s a human noticing something from a different angle.

I’m starting to think that AI complicates this in an uncomfortable way.

Not because it can generate ideas.
But because it can generate end results without requiring the inner state that used to precede them (for anyone, at almost any moment and with infinite variations on a theme).
You can almost publish without wondering.
Create without lingering.
Produce without being changed by the process.
Create as a director (which is a creator… but a different kind of creativity).

And that should give marketers (and everyone in business today) pause.

It feels like we’ve become very good at replicating the shape of creativity.
The cadence.. the tropes… even the emotional beats.
But shape isn’t substance.
And familiarity isn’t always meaning.
What Shingy kept circling was the idea that creativity is less about saying something new and more about being somewhere new internally.
A different posture… a different lens… a willingness to be surprised by your own thinking (not just curating or selecting from a machine’s output… that’s different).

That’s hard to reflect on… and, as you can tell, it’s also hard to put into words.

This stuff doesn’t scale neatly… it resists templates.
Which may be why we’ve tried to industrialize it instead?
AI accelerates all of this (and more).
It gives us creative results faster than we can form better questions.
It rewards speed over sensing… completion over contemplation.
And most of it is better than pretty good, if I’m being honest.

But now I’m thinking that we need to be careful because we’ll mistaken fluency for originality.

We’ll confuse output for insight.
We’ll fill the world with things that look creative but don’t feel alive.
Or the machine will learn so well from us that we’ll be fooled… and if that happens, will any of this still matter?
The irony is that the more automated creation becomes today, the more valuable the human interior becomes.

But for how long?

How long will taste, judgment and discernment be uniquely human?
It feels like our ability to sit with ambiguity long enough for something honest to emerge is quickly becoming a quaint habit of the past.
Creativity has always been a byproduct of attention.
Of noticing what others pass by.
Of caring enough to stay with an idea past the point of convenience.

That still hasn’t changed.

What’s changing, in this moment, is the temptation to skip that part entirely.
I’m constantly reminding myself that creativity isn’t a feature you turn on.
It’s a way you move through the world.
And no machine can do that for you… at least not yet.
So maybe the real question for the moment isn’t how (or if) we create with AI… maybe it’s this…

Are we still cultivating the inner conditions that made creativity possible in the first place… or have we decided that efficiency is good enough and we call it progress?

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