I had a conversation last week with a creative director I've known for twenty years. Brilliant guy. Won more awards than I can count. And he told me, quietly, like he was confessing something, that he'd started using AI in his workflow. He said it like he expected me to judge him.

I didn't judge him. I wanted to shake his hand. Because he'd done the thing that separates the people who'll thrive in the next decade from the ones who'll spend it being angry about the weather.

He started playing.

Two Camps

I've been having variations of this conversation for the past two years, and the pattern is so consistent it's almost eerie. There are two camps. Not pro-AI and anti-AI.. it's not that clean. It's more like the curious and the defensive.

Camp one is scared. And I get it. If you've spent twenty years mastering a craft and someone shows you a machine that can approximate it in seconds, the natural reaction is fear. That fear is valid. It's human. But it's also a terrible strategy.

Camp two is curious. They picked the thing up, played with it, broke it, got frustrated, tried again. They didn't ask "will this replace me?" They asked "what can I do with this that I couldn't do before?"

That question changes everything.

The people doing the best creative work right now aren't the ones ignoring AI. They're the ones who got curious early and never stopped.

What I Actually Mean by "Embracing"

I want to be specific here because "embrace AI" has become one of those phrases that means nothing. Like "digital transformation" or "synergy." Words that sound important and communicate zero.

When I say embrace AI, I mean something very simple: use it. Actually use it. Not in a demo. Not in a meeting where you nod along to a vendor pitch. In your actual work, on your actual problems, with your actual taste applied to the output.

I've watched tools come and go. Desktop publishing. The web. Flash. Mobile. Social. Every single time, the people who won were the ones who picked up the new thing and started making with it before they fully understood it.

AI is no different. Except it's faster. And the gap between the people who've started and the people who haven't is growing wider every week.

A cluttered desk in low light, stacks of books and a glowing monitor

The Best Tools Disappear

Here's something I've believed for a long time. The best tools in the world are the ones you stop noticing. You stop thinking about the tool and start thinking about the idea. The tool becomes invisible.

Think about a pencil. Nobody thinks about a pencil. You just think about what you're drawing. That's the dream state for any creative tool. And for decades, we've been stuck with tools that demand attention. Photoshop wants you to think about Photoshop. Figma wants you to think about Figma. They're brilliant, powerful, complex.. and they sit between you and the thing you're trying to make.

AI is the first creative technology I've used that genuinely starts to get out of the way. Not always. Not perfectly. But the trajectory is clear. When I can describe what I want and have something appear that's close enough to react to.. that's a different kind of creative conversation. That's me and the idea, with the tool quietly doing its job in the background.

That's the magic. And if you haven't felt it yet, you will.

The best tools disappear. You stop thinking about the tool and start thinking about the idea. AI is the first creative technology I've used that actually starts to get out of the way.

But the Output Is Mediocre

This is the objection I hear most, and it's the one I have the least patience for. Yes. If you type a lazy prompt into ChatGPT and hit enter, you'll get a mediocre result. Congratulations. You've discovered that lazy input produces lazy output. That's been true of every tool in the history of tools.

Give a camera to someone with no eye for composition and you'll get bad photos. Give Photoshop to someone with no design sense and you'll get bad designs. The tool isn't the taste. You are.

What AI does is compress the distance between your taste and the output. If you have strong opinions about what good looks like, if you've spent years developing that instinct, AI becomes the fastest way to express it. You're not outsourcing your creativity. You're accelerating it.

The people complaining about mediocre AI output are usually the ones who haven't put in the reps to get past the default. It's like picking up a guitar, strumming once, and declaring it sounds terrible. Of course it does. You just started.

What Changes When You Actually Start

I'll tell you what happened when I actually started. Not when I read about AI or watched demos or attended a conference panel. When I actually started using it every day.

First, I got faster. Obviously. Things that used to take hours took minutes. But that wasn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is that I started thinking differently. I became more ambitious. Because the cost of trying something had dropped so dramatically, I started trying things I never would have attempted before. Why not see what this looks like? Why not explore that direction? What if we went completely the other way?

That's the real creative case for AI. Not efficiency. Not cost savings. Not productivity metrics. It's that your creative aperture opens wider than it's ever been. You can explore more ideas, test more directions, push further into the weird and interesting corners that you'd normally skip because the execution cost was too high.

I build more now than I ever have. That should tell you something.

A solitary figure at a large industrial-loft window at dusk

The Human Part Gets More Important, Not Less

Here's the counterintuitive truth that the scared camp hasn't figured out yet. As AI gets better at execution, human judgment becomes more valuable, not less. Taste matters more. Point of view matters more. Knowing what to build and why matters more.

If everyone has access to the same AI tools.. and they do.. then the differentiator is no longer technical skill. It's creative judgment. It's the ability to look at ten AI-generated options and know which one is right. It's the ability to brief clearly, to iterate with intention, to make something that feels like it was made by a human who gives a damn.

That's creative leadership. That's always been the hard part. AI just made it the only part that matters.

When everyone has access to the same tools, the differentiator becomes taste. And taste has always been a human thing.

What I'd Say to My Scared Friends

I have a lot of friends in camp one. People I respect. People whose work I admire. And I don't think less of them for being cautious. I think caution is healthy. What worries me is when caution turns into paralysis.

If I could sit across from every creative person who's unsure about all of this, I'd say the same thing: start small. Pick one thing in your workflow and try doing it with AI. Not the whole thing. Not the important thing. Just one low-stakes experiment. See what happens.

Because what I've seen, consistently, is that once people start playing, the fear dissolves. Not because they become AI cheerleaders. But because they realize the tool is just that.. a tool. Their creative brain is still the thing doing the interesting work. The AI is just giving it more room to run.

The creative case for embracing AI isn't about technology. It's about creative people finally getting tools that match the speed of their thinking. We've been bottlenecked by execution for years. The bottleneck is lifting.

What you do with that freedom is up to you. But I know which camp I'm in.

Simon Berg builds at the intersection of creativity and technology. He writes about what he's seeing, what he's building, and why creativity matters more than ever.