AI as Creative Partner

Last week I wrote a text. One that didn’t work. I deleted it and started over. Three times. In the end the text was half as long as planned, said something different from what I’d intended and was better than anything I’d set out to write.

That’s how I write. Not because I can’t do it better but because writing is how I think. I don’t know beforehand what I want to say. I figure it out while I struggle with the sentences. And in the process I see myself more clearly than in any conversation.

AI is increasingly called a creative partner. It generates content and optimizes it. The promise is: less effort, better results.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe AI does produce better texts than I do, faster and with less friction. But sometimes I don’t want a better result. I want to see myself. I want a result that shows my open questions, not one that answers them.

A creative partner to me is something different. The view from the window that triggers a thought. An article I half-read and then put down because something of my own came to mind while reading. What these moments have in common: they don’t give me anything finished. They give me a nudge and then I have to make something of it myself.

AI works differently. It delivers a finished result. Fast and usable. But it takes away exactly the part that matters most to me: the struggle for the thought. The moment when I don’t know what I think and find out by writing.

When I hear that AI is a creative partner I shake my head internally. Not because the technology is bad. But because the word partner implies that both sides contribute something. AI contributes speed and patterns. What do I contribute when the result is already finished?

Maybe I’m too particular about this. Maybe most people don’t need this process. Maybe for them it’s about the result and if the result is right the path doesn’t matter. That wouldn’t be wrong. It would just be a different way of working.

But my way is different. Unproductive, learning, trying to understand.