Curbing Creativity

 

Most people don’t have a creativity problem. They have an approval problem.

You can watch it happen in real time. Someone starts to say an idea out loud, then suddenly edits themselves mid-sentence like they’ve got a tiny corporate lawyer living behind their eyeballs. “Well, maybe that’s stupid.” “This probably wouldn’t work.” “Forget it.”

The idea barely made it out of the driveway before getting pulled over for inspection.

Which makes sense. Modern culture trains people to become aggressively reasonable. Schools reward the right answer. Offices reward the safe answer. Social media rewards the fast answer delivered with the confidence.

Meanwhile, actual creativity is messy as hell.

Good ideas often arrive looking slightly stupid. They wander in incomplete ... making weird connections, asking inconvenient questions. And people kill them early because nobody wants to sound foolish in a culture obsessed with optimization.

So we edit too soon -- filtering while generating and judging while exploring. Because everything now has to sound optimized, validated, scalable, monetizable, and preferably summarized into a carousel suitable for posting on LinkedIn.

The irony is that originality rarely comes from people who are always certain. It comes from people willing to sit in ambiguity a little longer. People who can follow a strange thought without demanding a business case after thirty seconds. 

This looks suspiciously unproductive to people addicted to metrics, but the smartest people I know are rarely the quickest to declare certainty. They poke at ideas instead of immediately trying to win with them. And I believe that this is more of an advantage now than ever before. Because the world is filling up with polished sameness. Perfectly optimized content that is clean, efficient, frictionless, and dead on arrival.

The people who still matter creatively will be the ones willing to look a little foolish before they look correct. The ones who can resist editing every thought into compliance before it has a chance to breathe. The ones who may initially appear inefficient, but, when the dust has cleared, will be celebrated for their effectiveness.

Fortunately, Dav was not a very good listener.

Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” books have been translated into more than 37 languages with more than 90 million books sold worldwide.

Independence Day

 

July 4th: the day Americans collectively decide that freedom is best celebrated through grilled meat, minor explosions, and aggressively themed paper plates.

This time of year, every commercial starts the same way: soaring eagle, acoustic guitar, waving flag. Then a pickup truck drives through a wheat field in slow motion while a gravelly voice whispers: “This Independence Day, celebrate the American spirit.” Apparently, patriotism now comes with zero-percent financing and a free cooler.

Then there're the furniture and mattress sales. “LIBERTY SAVINGS EVENT!” You've gotta admit that nothing honors the founding fathers quite like financing a recliner until 2032.

And the food ads. Every burger on a backyard grill gets filmed like a cinematic masterpiece. Dramatic close-ups of ketchup dripping in slow motion like it’s a historical reenactment turn burger commercials into a patriotic documentary. And hot dogs. Why are hot dogs the official food of freedom? Why? Can we please find something that says “land of opportunity” better than mystery meat tubes consumed outdoors while balancing a paper plate on your knee.

And why are fireworks always sold in roadside tents that look one gust of wind away from becoming national news? Nothing inspires confidence quite like buying explosives from a folding table next to a handwritten sign that says: “MEGA COBRA DEATH ROCKETS.”

Also, can we discuss patriotic clothing? Every store expects me to buy star-spangled pants and shirts that say things like “RED WHITE & BREWS” or “PARTY LIKE IT’S 1776,” which is historically concerning because if we actually partied like it was 1776 we’d all die of dysentery before dessert.

Still, there’s something wonderfully fun about it all. Maybe it’s the collective agreement that for one evening we’ll all stand outside together, swatting bugs and looking upward while the sky explodes in patriotic glitter. Or maybe it’s just the cold beer. Hard to say.

Happy 4th of July, my fellow overheated freedom celebrants.

Now excuse me while I go spend 150 dollars on sparklers and bottle rockets … and assure my wife that no parts of the house will catch on fire this year.

Is AI learning from my writing or am I learning from AI writing?

 

Our writing is heavily influenced by what we're reading. We’ve always absorbed language from whatever we consume: 

• Read enough good writers and your sentences sharpen up. 
• Hang around surfers and suddenly everything is “gnarly.” 
• Spend six months on LinkedIn and your brain starts formatting thoughts into bullet points.

So, of course, reading enough AI-generated text has its impact, too.

Many people now spend their workday marinating in AI-assisted writing without really noticing it. Emails. Reports. Slack messages. Blog posts. Meeting summaries. Half the internet suddenly sounds like it graduated from the same customer service academy.

Consider the word delve which use to live primarily in fantasy novels and TED Talks. Now it’s everywhere, along with meticulous, comprehend, robust, and all the other strangely polished vocabulary that AI models love to spray around like scented disinfectant.

And it's not just impacting our writing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute studied hundreds of thousands of hours of podcasts and YouTube videos and found that words generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude tend to favor are showing up more in human speech too. 

This feels both fascinating and dystopian.

Obviously, nobody wants to sound like AI ... but I’m not sure people realize how hard that’s becoming when AI writing is increasingly the majority of what we read.

It's a predictable loop: AI learned from us. Now we’re learning from AI. It’s like photocopying a photocopy until the edges blur.

The words don't really bother me. I understand that language changes. It always does. But the flattening is concerning.

Everything starts sounding optimized. Smoothed out. Sanded down until there’s no splinters left. Human writing has personality. Odd rhythms. Unnecessary detours. Now everybody communicates like they’re trying to pass a brand safety review.

Maybe this is just what happens when language gets filtered through machines built to avoid risk and maximize clarity. But clarity alone is overrated. So is polish. A lot of memorable writing is memorable because it limps a little.

Anyway. I’m trying to resist becoming a statistically probable sentence generator myself.

Though apparently I should stop saying “apparently.” AI loves that one too.