The many ways AI is killing my creativity
I work in marketing, specifically content marketing. If you’ve been following the developments in AI over the past few years, you probably know that marketing is one of the industries where AI has been widely embraced. Many believe its adoption will boost productivity (and, ironically, creativity) to levels never imagined by greedy corporate executives.
When ChatGPT launched and captured everyone’s attention, I was already working in marketing, so I became one of its early users. My boss at the agency where I worked back then encouraged us to use ChatGPT daily. He was convinced that AI would help us create more engaging, interesting, and creative content, not to mention that it would make us work I-don’t-even-remember-how-much faster. So, I try it.
At first, I worried about losing my job, and then about others losing theirs. But after years of using AI to check off my to-do list as a copywriter and content manager, I realized the thing I fear the most about AI is how it can kill our creativity.
Yes, I use ChatGPT daily for work. Creative work. But is work I do to survive, and believe it or not, having knowledge using AI tools is something small and big marketing agencies are currently after when hiring new team members. So, yeah, I don't feel guilty about using them to do my soulless job and to write copy for emails and social media content that people are going to see and ignore when looking for the next reel with freakybob in it.
My real issue with AI is how it’s changing my thought process. How lazy and generic my thoughts are after a couple of years of crafting prompts instead of solving problems with my own creativity and experience.
I will never, and I can't stress this enough, NEVER use AI to write something that doesn't have to do with my corporate job. Not even a boring email or a text message asking for information. That doesn’t mean I hate AI, though.
While it might seem like I’m blaming AI, the reality is that I'm aware the real problem is how we use it, and how society encourages us to use it. I do believe AI is a helpful tool for mundane, day-to-day tasks, but my full thoughts on this subject deserve their own post, and this one isn't it. This is a list of ways I have found that AI is attempting to kill my creative self.
How AI is killing my creativity? (An ongoing list)
- I'm constantly thinking of prompts instead of actual ways to solve a problem.
- I sometimes rely on ChatGPT for translations instead of making the effort to translate on my own.
- Instead of editing the answer the AI has already written for me, I keep requesting changes until I can copy and paste it.
- I use AI for ideas when I should be using my intellect to catch them.
- When researching a topic, I go to ChatGPT and ask when I could have thought of different ways to find the information I truly need.
- When I want to make a recipe I ask the AI. Before I used to check different versions of that recipe and choose that sounded the tastiest.
- When writing in a foreign language, I use AI to double-check instead of making mistakes. But mistakes help me learn faster.
If this topic resonates with you, it would be awesome if you shared your own list with the Bear Blog community. Every list is personal, and I'm sure the ways AI affects creativity will differ depending on who is using it and which tools they rely on.
🦾 Remember, creativity is what makes us human. Thanks for reading.