Augmented Imagination

I’ve been wondering whether AI might overshadow human creativity. While doodling recently, I found myself asking if a machine could make my messy sketches shine. Perhaps. Would that diminish my own spark, or magnify it?

The real magic unfolds when we let AI serve as a flexible mirror, reflecting concepts back at us in unexpected forms. Imagine tossing an idea out to sea and having it return in a new shape, ready for further polish. AI can hand us a fresh angle, and it’s up to us to decide the final details. The human hand still holds the brush. We still decide where the technology ends and our personal imprint begins.

Maybe the key is to approach AI like a stage partner who can step in with a few lines when asked but who would never steal the show. It can amplify our voice, or if we ask it to, it could drown us out.

We can experiment with AI-generated images or writing suggestions that spark fresh directions. I suppose it’s all about staying curious and ensuring we remain in charge of our creative process.

We can lean on AI to do the heavy lifting, swiftly iterate on concepts we may not have considered, or may not have had the time to consider. But then we add our nuance, context, empathy, and personal history. That’s something algorithms will struggle to match.

In this sense, AI is very much the launch pad, not the destination. Likewise, the outcome is still very much ours, good and bad.

Our instincts become instructions and our curiosity becomes a probability chain. Is this augmented imagination?