Kelly Needs More Coffee

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI replacing creatives is that people really misunderstand what the creative process actually looks like. There's this great metaphor in the book "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This!" where he compares creativity to washing a pig. Imagine someone tells you to wash a pig by 3PM. You've never done it before, so you improvise. The pig runs away, you get covered in mud, nothing works the way you expected, but eventually you figure it out. And just about when you're finally done, the client walks in and tells you they actually wanted a warthog and you start over again. I fucking love this analogy because it perfectly captures why automating creativity with AI is so much harder than people realize. We're watching AI get insanely good at generating everything at pretty much every creative medium. but there's this assumption that automating the output means automating the creative process. And those are two VERY VERY different things. Bc so much of creativity isn't actually about making things but about figuring out what the hell you're even supposed to be making. It's about questioning the brief, connecting unrelated ideas, going down weird random rabbit holes, finding upon happy accidents, and sometimes realizing midway that you're solving the wrong problem entirely. There is really no way to predict the sequence of steps at all. Sometimes you know exactly what you want, other times you don't discover what you want until you accidentally stumble into it. and that is what makes creativity an extremely fascinating challenge for AI models. AI is getting incredibly good at washing pigs. But knowing which pig to wash, why you are washing it, or whether the pig even needs a bath? That is a whole different problem that I don't think we have solved yet.