3 Ways to Protect Your Creativity From AI
AI is very good at producing more.
More options. More variations. More speed.
What it still struggles with is depth.
If your creativity competes on volume, you’re already playing on AI’s home turf.
If it competes on depth, you’re playing a different game altogether.
Here are three ways to protect (and strengthen) your creativity in the age of AI — not by resisting it, but by moving where it cannot follow.
1. Root Thinking (Radical Thinking)
Most AI systems operate at the end of the chain.
They remix, rephrase, recombine what already exists.
Root thinking does the opposite: it travels backwards, toward first principles.
Instead of asking “How can this be improved?”, root thinking asks:
– Why does this exist at all?
– What assumptions are we silently accepting?
– What would happen if we removed the foundation entirely?
This kind of thinking is slow, uncomfortable, and deeply human.
It requires judgment, courage, and the ability to sit with uncertainty — none of which can be automated.
Root thinking doesn’t generate more ideas.
It generates different categories of ideas.
2. Embodied Experience (Emotion-Based Creativity)
Creativity is often described as a cognitive operation.
In reality, it is an embodied experience.
Ideas don’t just appear in the mind — they are felt first.
As tension. Curiosity. Desire. Fear. Excitement.
AI has no body.
No nervous system.
No emotional memory.
Human creativity is inseparable from lived experience:
– from frustration and joy
– from physical presence
– from emotional resonance
When creativity involves the body and emotion, it moves into a territory AI cannot access.
This is not about “being irrational” — it’s about being fully human.
3. First-Person Narratives (Subjective Creativity)
AI can tell stories.
What it cannot do is have a point of view.
Human creativity is anchored in subjectivity:
– a life lived
– a perspective shaped by experience
– a voice that cannot be replicated
First-person narratives aren’t just autobiographical.
They are interpretative acts: ways of making sense of the world from somewhere specific.
The more your creativity comes from who you are, not just what you know,
the harder it is to replace.
AI can generate content.
Only humans can generate meaning.