Artificial Intelligence in 2025I have a deep sense that I’m going to be wrong about this. Mostly because, when I talk about it, I can feel myself speaking from a place of fear or anger or something like that. Deep down, I guess I’m mad that people think/say/believe that what I’ve spent years and countless hours learning to do can now be done in minutes by “prompt engineers.” I also just don’t believe it.
At art and design school, the corridors were filled with young people who all felt compelled to make sense of the world by drawing, writing, painting, and sketching. It wasn’t scientific at all (which annoyed me); it was all based on how things felt. What today might be called “vibes.” We were developing taste, I guess. Everything was about ideas, and then it was about execution.
Where do ideas come from? I don’t know. But I think it has something to do with your feelings. We want to create things that feel like something so that other people know how to make sense of them. I don’t believe computers have feelings, and therefore I don’t believe they will ever create anything I’m interested in.
I keep seeing things like “this AI product is going to be your friend and solve loneliness,” or “this AI is going to find you the love of your life,” or “this AI is going to produce an Oscar-nominated short film.” And I’m just like, these are not things that are broken. Or if they are, AI isn’t the solution.
These ideas seem to come from the same type of person—someone for whom the worlds of creativity and culture are confusing, and AI seems to offer a way in.
AI Twitter feels like taking a group of computer science students to a third-year fine art show in a dusty warehouse with cleanskin red wine served in plastic cups and a good-bad DJ in the corner.
It’s like: great, you’re here. And you might have made something that looks like it could be in the show, but it’s missing something. It’s missing the idea and the feeling. I’m not sure where that metaphor goes exactly, but my strong feeling is:
AI is going to be incredible for some things and horrible for others.
The dividing line might be “hard vs. soft skills” or however you want to frame it.
If AI can figure out an mRNA vaccine in 24 hours—hell yeah. If it can solve protein folding, skin cancer detection, and fraud analysis, I’m down for it. We should be solving that stuff.
But I suspect we’re about to learn that far more of our jobs are actually more “creative” than we think and require a lot more “taste” and judgment than Sam Altman would have you believe.
A friend of mine in NY is a lecturer at Columbia University. The other day, she was marking papers, and I asked to see them. They were all handwritten, apparently to avoid the use of ChatGPT.
And apparently, all the faculty at Columbia already agree they can tell (or feel) when a student’s work has been done using AI tools. I asked how they knew, and the answer was that the students’ writing felt different. It sounded technical and smart with big words, but it wasn’t really saying anything.
This is what AI does (for now)—mimics things to sound like things. Maybe it gets better, but I don’t know.
“Craftsmanship is knowing how to work; art is knowing when to stop,” is a quote from the widely circulated
Ben Affleck interview in November. I like that.
The other amazing thing I saw on AI x creativity was the
Brad Tromel report. It might be behind a paywall, but it’s worth your time.
Wow, I’ve written much more than I expected on this. It’s going to be fascinating to see what gets made this year. Hopefully, I’ll still have a design job in 2026.
Have a great year!
Nick x
