The Creative Judgment Paradox

The greatest disruption AI brings to creative industries may not be automating production, but losing the experiences that develop creative judgment. For generations, expertise emerged through an imperfect process of experimentation, rejection, revision, and accumulated experience. Technology now lets us bypass much of that process to gain efficiency. But efficiency and intellectual development are not necessarily complementary. I hypothesize that as the cost of producing creative work approaches zero, the value of knowing what deserves to exist grows exponentially. This creates a paradox: the more capable our creative technologies become, the more essential human discernment is, precisely when traditional pathways for developing it are being compressed. The defining challenge for the next generation of creative leadership may be educational rather than technological. We are becoming extraordinarily proficient at training machines to create. Whether we are equally committed to developing the people who will direct them is another matter. I recently wrote an article that expands on this hypothesis, examining what happens to creative judgment when technology begins replacing the very experiences that traditionally developed it.

We’re Training the Machines. Who’s Training the Creatives?Read the expanded article on Medium ↗