What is Creativity
What is creativity?
I’m doing a partnership with Squarespace to promote their Web Design Industry report, and there is a quote in it that I can’t stop thinking about.
The 2026 State of the Web Design Industry Report (it’s a mouthful) is Squarespace’s annual report where they poll Squarespace web designers to get a pulse on the web design industry. This year, as you can imagine, there was a heavy emphasis on the impact AI is having on the designers and their work.
There was an open-ended question in the report: “What in your work will AI never be able to do better than you can?”. And one of the featured responses was: “Creativity cannot be replaced”.
I get why someone said this. It feels good, and I want to agree… but if I’m totally honest, I just don’t think it holds up.
AI has helped me brainstorm plugin ideas, write and refactor code, design silly demo sites, clean up emails, plan my marketing, and even come up with great meal recipes using whatever happens to be in my fridge. These are creative tasks. Coming up with something new and putting it into the world is creativity, no matter how you came to that new thing. Pretending that these tasks aren’t creative just because a math equation came up with them doesn’t make our jobs safer; it just makes us less honest.
So my hot take is this: AI is capable of creativity… but it’s not capable of discernment. It can participate in and execute on any part of the creative process that you direct it towards, but it still needs guiding to be valuable.
Execution used to be the scarce, valuable part of creative work. Remember that quote about ideas being cheap, but execution is everything? Well now ideas are cheap and execution is even cheaper. What’s scarce is discernment: the ability to decide whether something should exist at all, why it exists, who it’s for, and which tradeoffs are worth making along the way.
That’s the shift AI is forcing on me. For a long time, I hid in execution because it felt productive and safe. Heck, it was productive and safe. Writing code was easier than deciding what actually mattered. AI takes away that hiding place. When execution is cheap, fast, and abundant, the value moves upstream to harder, and dare I say more human, qualities like discernment, judgment, taste, and responsibility.
Creativity isn’t gone, but the job is changing. AI can help you create things. But it can’t decide which things are actually worth making, or take responsibility for them once they’re out in the world. That part is still on us.
Keep Building,
Will
