Where’s our moat on AI?

Designers asking "Where's our moat when AI is making millions of creative images a day?"...step back a moment.

Most of you have spent plenty of time in your careers considering what "creativity" means so you already know this, but let's take just one framework (and there are loads of them):

* combinatorial creativity - novel mashups of familiar things.

* exploratory creativity - working inventively inside an established style or set of rules

* transformational creativity - changing the rules themselves, inventing the style that didn't exist.

Yes, AI is alarmingly good at the first two. But it doesn't really do the third because it's trained on what has already been made.

It might make creative images - but creativity is a property of the thing AND a property of the making itself - the intent, the context, the point of view. A person decides that something was the right thing to make, to solve this problem. That lives in an aesthetic eye, or in artistic intuition, inspiration, or whatever else you want to call it.

Commercially, yes “creative" is mostly in the eye of the beholder - your clients are buying things that feel fresh and right for their problem, not creativity as an a label for its own sake. But the ability to reliably produce creative work that clients find right for their problem comes down to human judgement. Knowing which of the plausible options will resonate for their customers, and why, and being willing to put your name next to it.

So designers: you still own problem framing, asking the right questions to figure out not just what is really being asked for but also what is needed, and then making that judgment on what will best meet that need.

The moat has always been your ability to do these things. If you're not very good at those bits, then yeah you should panic about AI.