AI is pretty dope! Fast, clever, confident… and somehow getting better every single month. We’ve gone from the early ChatGPT days where you’d throw in a question and hope for the best, to full-on models that basically narrate their entire thought process in real time.
But here’s the thing, all that magic is still derived from human knowledge. Decades – centuries – of people doing the work. Trial, error, success, failure, the whole thing. When you ask about Alexander the Great or World War II, it’s not “intelligence” in the mystical sense – it’s just chewing through mountains of existing documentation and stitching together an answer.
Yeah, AI can discover stuff too – potential cures, new materials, optimised processes – but it’s merely accelerating what a human would do, not conjuring something alien from the ether.
And this is where it gets interesting for design.
AI can absolutely create designs. Slick ones. Clean ones. Stuff that ticks UI/UX best practices, follows the patterns and hits the right rhythm. No argument there. But every output is an echo of its training data. For all intents and purposes, it’s a remix machine.
So can it be creative?
Well… depends on what you think creativity actually is.
If you trace the modern television back far enough, you start with shadows on a cave wall, slide through Victorian zoetropes, stumble into CRTs, and end up with 4K OLED panels hanging off your wall like they’re made of paper. Humans took tiny steps, one after another, adding, refining, discovering. Bit by bit.
So here’s the twist. AI can discover things based on core principles, it can run thousands of variations in seconds and it can spot patterns we’d miss. So does that mean it can eventually “do” creativity? If creativity is just combining known things into new things, is AI already half way there?
Or…is creativity something else? Something that isn’t purely pattern-based? A leap instead of a remix? And if so… can something trained on the past ever truly create the “never seen before”?
Right now, I don’t think it can. Not properly. Not in that “gut-instinct, spark-in-the-dark” way that humans do. But I’m also thinking it probably won’t stay like that forever.
In the meantime, AI is an insane tool that has the ability to speed up so many processes. But actual creativity? The weirdness and leaps sprinkled with flavour?
Not yet.
