Dancing With the Machine: Finding Creativity in the Age of AI
Craig Aucutt / September 13, 2025
Seeing the Shift
We’re at the edge of something that feels both exhilarating and unsettling. Everywhere I look, AI isn’t just a background tool—it’s stepping onto the stage as a co-creator. I’ve been reflecting on how this compares to earlier waves of technology: the moment personal computers made creation accessible to anyone at home, the internet turned creativity outward and communal, and mobile made it constant, in our pockets. Now, with AI, the tools don’t just assist—they generate. They meet us halfway, shaping ideas before we’ve even had time to sketch them out.
The Evolution of Digital Creativivity Tools
Creativity has always been tethered to the tools of its time, and each era has reshaped not just what we can make, but how we imagine making it.
Computing Era
In the early computing era of the 1970s and ’80s, creativity with machines meant precision and patience. Programs like Adobe Illustrator (1987) and Photoshop (1990) opened new horizons, letting artists manipulate vectors and pixels instead of paper and paint. But the tools demanded skill; every adjustment was intentional, every mistake carried weight. Creativity was powerful but painstaking.
The personal computing boom of the 1990s and 2000s widened access. As PCs spread, design software landed on more desks, and the creative studio became a dorm room or a bedroom. Tools like Adobe’s Creative Suite and QuarkXPress made desktop publishing, photo editing, and video production accessible to a growing number of people. Creativity became democratized, but it was still largely solitary and manual—hours spent sculpting layers, refining typography, or adjusting filters.
Internet Era
Then the internet era arrived in the mid-2000s, shifting the center of gravity from making to sharing. Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and DeviantArt transformed individual expression into collective culture. Suddenly, creators had instant audiences, and tools adapted for web-first outputs. Collaboration was clunky at first—emailing files back and forth, uploading ZIPs—but the seeds of shared creative workflows were planted. The internet expanded the canvas and brought community into the process.
Mobile Era
The mobile era of the 2010s put creation directly in our pockets. With smartphones and tablets, the tools of expression were always with us. Apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Procreate made creativity portable, spontaneous, and frictionless. A photo edited in seconds could reach thousands instantly. What once required a studio now happened while waiting for coffee. Creativity became lived, moment to moment, embedded in daily life.
From there, the cloud-first collaborative era emerged. Tools like Figma (founded 2012, launched publicly in 2016) and Adobe XD allowed real-time, multiplayer design. Creativity became social at its core—teams across continents sketching, commenting, and refining in shared digital spaces. This wasn’t just a technical shift but a cultural one: creation was no longer a solo act but a collective performance.
AI Era
Now we stand in the AI era, where the paradigm shifts again. Tools no longer wait for our every move—they propose, generate, and remix on their own. Adobe integrates generative AI directly into Photoshop, while platforms like Midjourney or ChatGPT generate art, text, music, and even applications in minutes. Figma is experimenting with AI that suggests layouts or fills in designs. The canvas is bigger than ever, but the challenge is different: it’s not whether we can create, but how we choose to direct the flood of possibility AI unleashes.
When Everything Is Possible, What Still Matters?
Abundance is a gift, but also a paradox. If a single prompt can produce fifty variations, what makes one stand out? Creativity has always thrived on tension—the push between vision and execution, the surprises hidden in the messy process. If AI removes all friction, do we lose the human spark that gives work its soul?
I’ve felt this in practice. Sometimes AI dazzles me with instant results, but they can feel hollow, too polished, missing the imperfections that make ideas breathe. Other times, it opens doors I never knew existed, suggesting paths I’d never have walked alone. The difference lies in whether I let the tool replace me or whether I step in as collaborator, editor, and guide.
Keeping Creative Control
The challenge, then, isn’t whether AI can create—it’s how we engage with it. For me, the sweet spot lies in using AI as a partner rather than a proxy. I lean on it to spark raw material, but I filter the output through my taste, perspective, and intent. Creativity becomes a process of curating, sculpting, and refining rather than accepting the first output. The imperfection, the editing, the human hand—that’s what gives the work life.
Navigating This New Terrain
Being creative with AI is less about replacement and more about reframing. It asks us to balance speed with meaning, abundance with discernment. AI can widen the field of play, but the voice is still ours—the risks we take, the instincts we trust, the choices we make.
Looking back, the story of creative tools has always been about this dance: between power and control, speed and depth, new possibilities and timeless instincts. AI doesn’t end that story. It just writes the next chapter.