None of this is meant to be easy.

A few weeks ago I was working on a big brief, and we had multiple territories that people were happy with, but something inside me just wasn’t sitting right. I couldn’t shake it. I was restless for a couple of weeks. Losing sleep. Just could not shake the feeling that there was a better answer out there.

I’ve been fairly outspoken and critical around the use of AI, but don’t for a second think I am anti-AI. I am anti-shit AI, sure, like I’m anti-shit anything. I use AI nearly every day. But mostly for insights, cutting out grind work, research, mood and reference, not for concept or execution. Shortcuts, basically. And in that regard, it’s a powerful tool.

The pitfalls have started becoming obvious to me lately, though. And that word, shortcut, is probably why. Due to the volume and pace at which agencies are expected to work now, the temptation to start your research and insight digging on ChatGPT or Claude is considerable. And a lot of my ideas on this brief had started with areas raised by AI that I’d then organically built on.

Then, late one night, in a fit of frustration, I shut my laptop, threw my phone across the room, and just grabbed a pen and pad. Started clean. Just started thinking. Not googling or prompting and then using the responses to lead my thinking. Just me and my thoughts. And the ideas and avenues that started opening up were different. Less obvious, more lateral, less derivative, more playful. A stream of stuff came out that I took back to the work we’d already done and helped reshape it. Stuff that 500 prompts wouldn’t have unearthed. A few days out from the presentation, I finally felt calm again. And it went really well with the client.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…” - Theodore Roosevelt.

Maybe it’s coming up in the industry when it was still common to pull all nighters and sleep on a couch in the agency and go through hell and back to crack a brief, maybe it’s all the Elden Ring I’ve been playing since the DLC came out, maybe it’s just the fog of the intense virus I’ve been battling the past 5 days… but sometimes disparate messages from the universe can all be trying to illuminate the same thing.

This is not meant to be easy. Creativity is hard. Thinking is painful. (Why do you think so many people still use their phones in the car? Rather risk death than be alone with their thoughts for 20 minutes.) But it’s the wading through the hard to get to the gold that makes it all worth it. The feeling of finally tapping into some rich new vein of creative expression is what the chase is about, and you won’t ever find that place at the press of a button.

I’m not trying to be some ridiculous masochist here, I’m just thinking back to why I ever started doing this. Why did I ever start making music? Why did I ever start painting? Why did I ever start coming up with ideas for a job? The ‘process’ of all of it can be a slow, tedious nightmare, but then all of a sudden… something clicks and it all makes sense. And the weight of the triumph is directly calculable to the difficulty of the journey you had to take to get there. (Much like when you finally take down Messmer the Impaler. What an absolute bastard that guy is.)

None of this is meant to be easy. It’s supposed to be hard.

This is perhaps a less pointed rambling than my normal posts, written from the couch where I’m rugged up on cold and flu tablets, but I thought I’d share my brain rattlings nonetheless, as I wonder who else has been going through similar machinations as we navigate this weird juncture of technology and creativity.

The lesson for me, the warning I dare say, about diving deeper and deeper into AI is DON’T STOP THINKING.

Because AI is like putting on a mech warrior suit. Immediately, you feel more powerful. Bigger, faster, stronger. But the longer you wear that suit, the more your own muscles atrophy from underuse. That includes the one in your noggin. And when you step out of the suit, you might find yourself weaker than you originally were. (I know the brain is technically not a muscle but let’s just pretend it is for the services of this metaphor. A mech warrior themed metaphor is pretty cool.)

Learn the tech. Understand it. Play with it. (I’ve made two AI projects for this purpose, needsmoreboom.com and instagram.com/sickbandnamesintheheraldsun)

But don’t have it replace what made you a great creative to start with.