About shortcuts and long roads and what comes out when you let the exploration be the goal.
We have lost the fear of the void. Of the white page, the blank, that blue-Monday feeling when you try to put the pieces of yourself back together to start again, in front of a project, a goal, a life.
AI is filling the blanks.
I swear I wanted to skip AI this week. I wanted to write about the Pope, and about what a renewal of faith (remarkable to my agnostic eyes) says about culture in the militantly secular societies most of us live in on this side of Europe.
And yet I am back to «it».
The past week brought a literary scandal in France. The Académie Goncourt removed Haitian–Canadian author Thélyson Orélien’s novel, C’était ça ou mourir, from the longlist of France’s most prestigious literary prize. This came days after an X account, anonymous at the time, ran the book through an AI detector and declared it machine-written.
I don’t know what is true about this book. I haven’t read it yet, but something in me rebels at the method: an anonymous account using an AI tool to rule on whether human creativity counts as human at all. It feels and smells a bit like Salem. This new pseudo-morality is a bad joke when every tool we use is flooded with AI and nudges us to embrace it: our word processors, our illustration software, even LinkedIn. The same platform where posts and comments calling out «AI content» proliferate handsomely is the one that lives off our content, and has spent years pushing us to play by a certain rulebook (hashtag emoji hashtag mention hashtag… lol).
We are deep in an era in which almost every creative discipline is offered powerful ways to remove friction. We can generate images without drawing them, text without writing it, music without playing it, visual directions without developing them and hundreds of variations without making each one. The obvious debate is whether the outputs are good enough (and I think a decent number of them are). But that is the wrong place to start. The more interesting question is what happens to the creative person when the process itself becomes optional.
Virginie Despentes now writes in a notebook. She turned away from her screen because AI had slipped into Word and Google without anyone asking her, and she used that very argument to defend Orélien. Rick Rubin, who says his main talent is recognising other people’s talent, sits at the opposite end: for him, prompting can be part of the creative process. “I don’t have any talent. I have no way to express my creativity. But I could talk to the AI, and maybe I could prompt the AI into making something beautiful, through iteration and prompting.” In his view, AI is a punk tool. It lets people make music with two chords, while making taste, curiosity and individual perspective more valuable, not less.
Thomas Bangalter answers from the other side of the studio and says he isn’t interested in AI as a creative tool. AI is obsessed with the output, he argued, while his process was never about the output. Prompting asks you to put into words what, for him, happens beneath words. AI is, in his phrase, “a way to bypass the creative process.”
Three or four months ago, I was pretty close to Rubin’s position. I felt as concerned with the ethical and environmental implications as empowered by the possibilities it offered, quick prototyping of ideas for instance. Then I fell into a small crisis: clients can now type a brief or paste my recommendation into a prompt box and get something that looks fine.
Then Giorgia Lupi, whom I deeply admire, wrote an important piece for The New York Times that moved me, comforted me and answered some of my doubts, where she passionately claims the value of the long road that is the creative process.
She is the third creative person in this piece to highlight, as the Buddhists say, that «the path is the goal» (yes, I am probably biased). For creativity applied to a field such as design (from strategic design to product design and everything in between), and within a business relationship, the one that links a service provider to a business owner, I think the long road versus the shortcut is what will define whether the work is meaningful and long-lasting.
Creation rhymes with exploration, whether the project is professional or personal. Technology has always given designers and creatives new, faster ways to translate their thinking into production. But what happens when a technology delivers the end result before any creative thinking has happened at all?
What happens is standardisation. Strategies, businesses and designs are annoyingly starting to look the same. It is not new, of course. Humans are perfectly capable of taking you to those shores too. AI makes it faster, and it is starting to sign its work (Anthropic has begun watermarking what Claude writes).
As a strategic designer, my full focus is clarity. More precisely, clarity that carries consequence. My job is to understand the complexity of businesses, their markets and the cultures they interact with, and to translate it rather than flatten it into the simplest answer. To do that, I need to get lost in the problem. It is the journey through a client’s labyrinth that lets me come out with a distinct perspective.
Let me use music as a metaphor.
My eldest son wants to learn to DJ. Today, a controller is a nice shortcut that will spare him the pain of beat matching (I know what I am talking about), and its effects will let him transition smoothly or get the drop right no matter what. Yet it is the struggle that teaches you to listen intentionally, so that you find your way in and out of the musical patterns and weave a meaningful experience for the audience. The long road is what allows spontaneity, surprise, and even mistakes that take you somewhere unexpected.
Of course, you can argue: «We are talking business here, miss. Unexpected outcomes do not fit well in my spreadsheet.» My only counter-argument: the unexpected is where new opportunities hide, and where, eventually, you find the destination that makes you win.
I only DJ now and then. When I do, I prepare. I dig into my collection, looking for textures, feelings, sounds that remind me of this or that person I know will be there. On the night, I know the first one or two records I want to open with, just as I know the first set of questions I’ll ask a client in the exploration phase. After that, I feel the room. I use the interaction to enrich the process. I may not know exactly where I’m going at first, but I aim to leave a meaningful trace.
Erasing the creative path is, for designers, pretty much like pre-recording your set. It won’t get me there. Nor you.
P.S. After a week of watching an anonymous account put a novelist on trial, I’d rather say it myself: at La Colmena, we use AI. As an instrument, never as the author. What we use it for, what we refuse to use it for, and why any client can ask us not to use it at all is written here: lacolmenadesign.com/ia