Are we living through the transformation of creativity itself?

It’s a perfect fall afternoon and I’m deep in the woods doing one of my favorite things: riding my mountain bike on some challenging trails. It’s quite the scene with the beauty of Mother Nature on full display, and I find it borderline mesmerizing.

When I’m riding, I have lots of time to think. It’s not uncommon that I end up thinking about work without even setting out to solve anything specific. For me, cycling is magic for spurring on creative thinking.

Today, I’m thinking about how hard a sport this is and whether I’m cheating by riding my e-bike. Many hardcore cyclists would argue that the technology is making my ride easier and that’s not a true riding experience. If you’re not suffering, it’s not really real. Shame on me.

There was a time when my younger self would have thought that, too, but now I realize the motor isn’t doing all the work. It’s helping me go farther so I can have more fun. Bring it on!

The more I rode, the clearer it became. My e-bike wasn’t replacing me; it was enhancing the experience. In that moment, I couldn’t help but think about the other ride I’m on: creativity in the age of AI.

After nearly 30 years in marketing, there’s one thing I know: It’s always been an industry in motion and in various states of reinvention, which is one of the reasons it’s so appealing. But the current velocity of transformation is undeniable. AI has crashed the party and is touching every aspect of our business, including especially creativity.

DS+CO has been using AI across the agency. It shows up in all the areas you would expect, from helping us become more efficient to making versions at scale, enabling us to illustrate our ideas more completely—and everything in between.

Confession: I’m truthfully having a blast playing with GenAI. It’s pushing our work like I didn’t think it could just a short eight months ago, and I can’t wait to see how we’ll be using it in the next few months, let alone years from now. That’s equal parts exciting and scary.

There’s no doubt we’re witnessing an inflection point. Is creativity still a human act when the digital tools can think, write and design alongside us?

What’s happening to creativity? And will AI be capable of doing what truly makes us special, eventually becoming as creative as humans?

For all the technological progress we’ve made, creativity still feels undeniably human and like something that can’t be reduced to lines of code or algorithms. Creativity doesn’t just happen in the mind, it happens in the heart and in the gut, in the space between what currently exists and what has the potential to be.

AI looks back to learn. It’s great at analyzing patterns and predicting what’s likely to resonate, but it doesn’t feel wonder. It doesn’t know what it’s like to be moved by a piece of music. Or the grind of staying up half the night obsessing over a headline that just isn’t hitting the mark yet. Don’t get me wrong, it can generate a lot of headlines, and it might even come up with a clever one. But it doesn’t understand the journey and the thrill of finally nailing an idea that makes people laugh, cry, feel or think differently.

Creativity taps into emotion and connection. It’s born from lived experiences like joy, pain, memory and curiosity. We create to express something about being alive, to make sense of the world or to even change it. That’s something machines can copy but not truly own.

If there’s a superpower that most great creators share, it’s empathy. Whether it’s work that connects across cultures or a story that touches someone at just the right time, empathy builds significance. AI might see the what and the how, but it will never understand the why.

Intuition plays a critical role in idea development. It’s the unexplainable creative instinct that tells you when something works, even when the data disagrees. The human creative process thrives on serendipity and imperfection. The wrong brushstroke. Offbeat rhythm. Smashing things into each other that have no business being together. Even a delightfully weird phrase you stumbled into. These are exactly the ingredients that make the work unexpected and special.

We’re messy, we break things and are perfectly imperfect. That should be A-OK.

We’re becoming more and more surrounded by creative that looks new but feels suspiciously familiar, like a rehash of effective work that’s already been done. In a business that rewards bold thinking, letting AI drive creativity is the quickest way to get swallowed up in a sea of sameness.

AI will select formulaic logic over the illogical every time. It struggles to take risks, and taking risks is what often leads to something amazing.

Sooner or later, the push for more speed and hollow synthetic perfection will get old and consumers will crave something more human again.

So if creativity is a deeply human experience, where does that leave AI?

It’s tempting to view AI as a competitor. After all, it can write headlines and copy, create images and video, develop code, compose music, even build entire campaigns. So many things that once lived exclusively in the human domain are now being made by machines that don’t even need their morning coffee to get going.

If we take a step back and reframe our attitude toward AI’s role within the creative process, there is tremendous opportunity to think about it as a new form of collaborator.

We’ve long grown accustomed to “traditional creative teams” where an art director teams up with a copywriter and they mix their experience in their technical craft with the ability to generate and volley ideas back and forth.

Rethinking a team as a creative human + AI machine is already coming into focus, and that is going to accelerate quickly. Technical craft will still be important, but so will additional skills and knowledge, like prompting and understanding how to harness the power of AI to ask better questions, see ideas from new angles and expand what’s possible.

I’d argue that the real competition isn’t between humans and machines. It’s between what we were capable of before and what the potential is now. AI is our super +1 and will allow us to move quicker and explore deeper. It will even get into the weeds with you at 2am when your creative director is off in dreamland and that’s when your ideas start flowing.

As creative leaders, our role has always been to imagine what’s next and inspire others to see it, too. The explosion of GenAI doesn’t change that mission—it reinforces it. And the more capable the technology becomes, the more essential our human viewpoint will be.

AI can help us move faster, but it doesn’t decide where we should go. We set the course, define the vision, push boundaries and protect the soul of the work.

Europe-based fashion retailer Zalando used GenAI to produce brand campaign imagery in record time, cutting production from 6-8 weeks down to just a few days and reducing costs by nearly 90%. The results worked because the creative team stayed in control of the concept, tone and visual direction.

Contrast that with fashion label Collina Strada’s collaboration with BAGGU, which sparked backlash when it emerged that many prints in the collection were generated by AI. For a brand rooted in handcrafted art and sustainability, that disconnect felt inauthentic. Consumers questioned the brand’s values and even threatened to cancel orders.

That’s the tension we’re all navigating. AI can amplify creativity, but only when we lead it with intention, keeping the work meaningful, original and unmistakably human.

Back out on the trails, back deep in thought.

When I’m being honest with myself, I realize my e-bike unlocks the best version of me as a cyclist and empowers me like never before. I still sweat and I’m still physically challenged, but it helps me climb higher and explore territories I might not have attempted without it. It changes my experience.

Technology, especially AI, is working for us much the same way. It’s our new assist. We shouldn’t resist it but learn how to ride with it and incorporate it to take our work to new places.

There’s no question that creativity is being transformed. But it’s certainly not the end of creativity as we know it. It’s the beginning of a new, more expansive version of it.

If we’re willing to open our minds, adapt, and keep pushing and exploring, we’ll find ourselves somewhere entirely new.

To that, I say, bring it on!

Want to talk more about AI and creativity?
Interested in how AI can help take your business to new places?
How about a mountain bike ride?
Reach out at mark_stone@dixonschwabl.com and let’s make a plan.
See you on the trails.