Earlier this week, we stumbled upon a Substack note that asked a question we haven’t been able to shake: is AI making us more creative, or more dependent? The question reaches well beyond AI, and it’s far too tangled to settle with a simple yes or no, at least for now.
What we can say is that AI will replace human creativity for some people and leave it almost untouched for others. Which group you end up in may have less to do with talent than you’d think. For the sake of this essay, let’s split people into two camps, keeping in mind that real life is a lot messier.
Camp 1: The makers
Think of the painters and musicians, the writers and sculptors who make the world a little more beautiful.Some of them use AI somewhere in their process and plenty refuse to touch it, but for most, the spark isn’t something they would hand over easily. Their ideas come from their own view of life and the things they surround themselves with, from a walk in the park or the way a ray of sunshine hits the floor at home. As Pablo Picasso put it, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
For makers, creativity is tied to who they are. They create because they want to, often in their free time and often for no money at all, so there’s a natural reason to protect the part that feels most like them. An illustrator might let AI clean up a background, but asking it to come up with the drawing would defeat the whole point of drawing.
Camp 2: The problem-solvers
Then there are people who look at the world through a more analytical lens, like researchers, developers, doctors, and lawyers. They may not pick up a brush or write a poem, but they’re creative all the time. A developer finds an unusual way to fix a bug at 4:55 PM on a Friday, while a doctor connects two symptoms nobody else thought to link. This is creativity too, the kind that produces out-of-the-box solutions instead of paintings, and most of the world quietly runs on it.
The difference lies in the conditions. Problem-solving creativity usually happens at work and against a deadline, often when people are already running on empty. And AI happens to be built for exactly this kind of task, since it’s very good at suggesting a fix or a fresh angle in seconds.
Why the problem-solvers might lose more
This is where our argument gets a little counterintuitive. We suspect AI is less likely to replace the painter’s creativity than the engineer’s, because one kind of creativity is protected by passion while the other is squeezed by pressure.
Picture the developer again. The bug needs fixing by five, there are meetings before then, and a tool can propose a clever solution right now. Taking it is a perfectly rational choice, and nobody would blame them. The trouble is what happens after a few hundred of those choices. In an earlier note, we wrote about how skills fade when people stop practicing them, and we see no obvious reason why creative problem-solving should be an exception.
There’s also a quieter cost mentioned in a 2024 study by Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser. They found that stories written with help from AI ideas were rated as more creative individually, while being more similar to one another as a group. Everyone improved, and everyone started to sound alike. For a team of engineers asking the same model for the clever fix, that’s worth thinking about.
The real problem might be time
This takes us back to the note that started it all. In the comments, we argued that creativity comes from the inside, and that modern life leaves very little room for it. Between work and screens, most of us simply don’t have the time or energy left for an idea to grow on its own.
In another discussion, Pauline Guicheney pushed this further, and we think she was right: the problem started long before AI. Phones and feeds were filling every quiet moment years before chatbots arrived, and those quiet moments matter more than they seem. In a well-known 2014 experiment, psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman had some participants do something deliberately dull, copying numbers out of a phone book, before a creativity task. The bored group came up with more creative ideas than the people who had skipped the boring part.
So maybe dependency on AI isn’t a sign that people have stopped being creative. Maybe it’s what happens when tired people are offered a finished idea at exactly the moment they have no space to find one. The makers protect that space because their identity depends on it, while the problem-solvers rarely get the chance.
What could help
None of this means problem-solvers should stop using AI. It means being a little more deliberate about when it comes in. Spend ten minutes alone with the problem before opening the chat window, and use AI to test and develop a solution you already have rather than to hand you the first one.
We saw a lovely example of this recently, in Pauline’s post, who does her best thinking while weeding the garden and only afterwards takes those ideas to AI to work through. The mind wanders first, the machine comes second, and that order might be the whole trick.
So, which camp are you in?
Most of us move between the two, depending on the deadline and how tired we are. The painter on a rushed commission might slip into the second camp, and the lawyer who walks every morning before work might live in the first.
When did you last have an idea that nobody, human or machine, helped you finish?