What we lose when we lose the creative struggle

How removing friction from creative tools removes the meaning from creative work

Twenty-five or so years ago, one day after school I went to visit my dad at his office. We didn’t have a computer at home at the time so whenever I was around his, I would beg him to let me use it to play with MS Paint.

I was probably around 7 or 8, and my go-to artwork was a portrait of my him made with the spray tool — perfect to recreate his short, spiky hair and stubble — and I’d make his head ridiculously big and tease him about it. He still has one of these masterpiece in his desktop wallpapers rotation, I’m pretty sure.

I couldn’t draw much else with the mouse, nothing more complicated than a lopsided house and a tree, so I would ask him, knowing full well he wasn’t the artist in the family, to draw something for me; that day I asked for a dog. He tried his best, but what came up on the canvas was a misshapen thing — a kind of pig-dog hybrid that was so bad it had us laughing for a good while.

I wasn’t always sure why that random ugly dog had stayed with me for so long, but I see now it was a symbol of the connection my dad and I shared that day. This memory has resurfaced a few times now that there’s so much emphasis on AI image generators — these tools that can (sometimes, for now) create breathtaking art effortlessly yet leave me, and many others, wondering about their real purpose.

I’ve been thinking about what it would have been like if instead of just our best intention and some basic tools we would have had at our disposal Midjourney or something else that day, how my request to my dad would have been the same but the result much more different. The quality of the artwork itself is beside the point — the whole interaction and the unexpected moment between us it’s what would have been lost.

There’s been countless debates on what makes art art, why or why not AI outputs can or should be considered the same as human ones. Now every month we have a new tool we can use, one of the latest being Sora 2, adding no value to the human experience while claiming to ‘democratise’ creativity — an overused phrase that does nothing, if not mistaking access for meaning.

From a UX perspective, the process of AI image generation is as frictionless as it can be: type, click, wait and receive what you’ve asked for, perhaps refine it. As ever, the promise is accessibility by letting anyone create regardless of skill, but I would argue there’s a difference between democratising outcomes and democratising the creative process itself.

With these tools it’s like we’re giving everyone a printer instead of a paint brush, and by doing that, what we’re losing is the struggle and the lessons that come with it, so much so that creation doesn’t even feel like creating anymore.

When the outputs are automated we’re stripping away the messy, truly generative, experience where actual creativity lives.

I can’t deny that, in some cases, these programs can spit out objectively beautiful outputs. But as much as those AI images might look right, there’s always something missing: whether it’s the person behind it trying to communicate something they can’t quite articulate, or the surprise and frustration of actually getting your hands dirty with a tool.

If you’ve ever tried Midjourney’s on Discord, you’ll know that the experience is quite far from one of creativity. You’re left to watch dozens of other people’s prompts and outputs stream by, and few will truly experiment since it’s much easier to copy successful formulas when wanting a certain result.

Or the variation buttons — why struggle with your vision when you can just generate alternatives until one feels “good enough”? I can’t get over how these “creative” tools take away the mess and uncertainty where creativity actually happens, and offload what’s arguably the best part of the process to a randomising algorithm.

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s disheartening how as a society we can go from celebrating paintings made hundreds, even thousands of years ago, studying each stroke, letting them tell us a story and move us, to being satisfied with something so fundamentally different.

The point of art, no matter the category — I believe — is that it’s inseparable from the artist behind it. To an extent we can see the quirks and struggle in every piece, sometimes a message, or at the very least, the personality of the artist. What draws us to art isn’t only its beauty — it’s the artist’s way of seeing that gets captured by all the tiny decisions made while creating it. And that’s what makes art unique and human.

I am by my own admission a bit of romantic when it comes to oldschool software, but if creativity becomes automated we risk losing the very thing that makes art meaningful — the experience of creating something. Then what’s going to happen to all those “happy little accidents” and self expression, that come with the creative struggle?

As designers, we always aim to reduce friction and remove barriers, but watching people use AI tools for art is, frankly, just a bit sad. Scrolling through options until you find a good one doesn’t really scream creative process.

Recently I had a conversation with someone comparing AI art to electronic music (along the lines of “new technology disrupts an art form, skeptics resist but creativity adapts”). I’m not a musician myself but I think that when you dig deeper, the two situations are quite different in terms of what technology is doing to the creative process: electronic music gave artists new ways to create, while AI art gives machines new ways to imitate creation.

We should recognise this distinction especially because we spend our careers thinking about how interfaces guide decisions. We know that removing steps from a process doesn’t just make it faster, but it can change what that process is.

So I keep thinking about this ugly digital dog from 1999, how it might be the most valuable piece of art in my memory, even though — or especially because — it was not perfect and looked almost nothing like a dog.

Further reads/watch

AI is not “democratizing creativity.” It’s doing the opposite — Brian Merchant
Sora proves the AI bubble is going to burst so hard — Adam Conover
Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice — J. F. Martel

What we lose when we lose the creative struggle was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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