AI can be creative. Mine can’t. What gives?

Two hours of asking Claude to put a small sun above an “i”. Eight versions in, the rays still touched the dot. A human designer would have done it in a minute. Awkward.

The public conversation right now is about AI writing Pixar films, generating Studio Ghibli stills that go viral, topping Spotify charts. AI is creative. Apparently.

How am I thinking wrong?

Generation is cheap. Judgement is the whole thing.

AI is a generation engine. Ask for a hundred logos, you get a hundred logos. Output volume is free. That’s genuinely new.

But creativity isn’t generating options. It’s killing the wrong ones. A good art director generates twelve, kills eleven, presents one. The one is the work. The eleven are the cost. AI drops the cost of the eleven to zero. It does nothing to the part that matters.

The Studio Ghibli trick is pastiche

Studio Ghibli has a defined visual language. The model has seen ten thousand frames. Producing a Ghibli still is interpolating inside training data — and it is very good at that.

That’s not creativity. It’s regurgitation in style.

Ask the same model for a new logo for a Dubai consultancy with no training-set precedent. It estimates. It guesses. It produces something that looks vaguely like a logo, the way a bad parody looks vaguely like the person.

Taste is what’s missing

Taste is twenty-five years of squinting at proofs. The click in your gut when something is right.

The AI does not have a gut. It has weights. You can describe taste to it. You cannot give it taste.

What it is good for

The grind. Hand it a sketch, it builds the CSS. Hand it a brand voice, it writes a thousand hero variants. Hand it a campaign, it tests ten subject lines across four audiences. Tirelessly. Cheaply. Cleanly.

The lesson for marketing

AI runs the funnel. The human stays the eye. Don’t ask your AI to be creative. Ask it to grind. Then bring your taste.

Wrong tool for wisdom. Right tool for everything else.

The crude robot in the hero image was generated by Higgsfield in five minutes. The Toy Story still took Pixar four years. The juxtaposition is the argument.