Creative Debt

"Fuck AI. Destroy it. Kill it."

That's what Ronny Chieng advised young Harvard graduates. But what at first seems like a rant against AI is actually a passionate plea to use your head. Chieng references the Harvard study „Your Brain on ChatGPT“, showing that excessive reliance on AI creates Cognitive Debt – the brain offloads thinking, stops practising it, grows weaker. His point: use AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics. Instead, we use it to summarize our emails.

And in a way, the same goes for the creative industry. We've been reassuring ourselves for years that creativity stays human. „A machine can't do that.“ Nice thought. And at the same time, we're outsourcing exactly that part of our work to AI, by having ChatGPT generate „our“ ideas. Don't get me wrong. Used right, AI can lead to genuine creative excellence. I use it every day. It makes me faster, better – sometimes it feels like I suddenly have a hundred new arms. But I know a good idea when I see one. That's a muscle I've trained for a long time.

The thing is: The next generation of creative talent probably won’t build that muscle, because they never had a reason to question what the machine gives them. Here's the bind: don't use AI and you'll fall behind. Use it without knowing what good looks like and you become replaceable, because mediocre creative work is exactly what the machine does faster and cheaper than any human. Chieng calls it Cognitive Debt. What I see happening in our industry, I'd call Creative Debt. And that is something that actually worries me.