AI Isn’t the Problem—We Are

It’s not the tools that are ruining creativity. It’s the decisions we’re making with them.

The problem isn’t AI

There’s a familiar narrative in creative industries right now: AI is the threat. It’s coming for our jobs. It’s going to make designers irrelevant, writers obsolete, and the internet unbearable. But the longer I’ve worked with these tools, the more I think we’re blaming the wrong thing.

AI—the technology—isn’t the villain in this story.

The real problem is us—humans. The people building it, funding it, deploying it, and racing to scale it without understanding what’s being lost along the way.

I’ve written before about how AI can be a super pencil—a tool that speeds up exploration and unlocks new creative potential. And I still believe that. There are countless examples of artists, designers, and writers using AI to extend their imagination, not replace it. From rapid prototyping in Cursor or v0 to video creation in Runway, the tools themselves have incredible potential. A 2023 Adobe study found that 74% of creatives believe AI can enhance their work—not threaten it. That vision is still on the table.

But that’s not the direction we’re heading. And it’s not because of the technology itself. It’s because of the people deciding what to do with it.

When Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of deep learning, resigned from Google last year, it wasn’t because AI had become too powerful—it was because humans were handling it irresponsibly. “I’m not saying we should stop developing this technology,” he said, “but we should put in a lot more effort into thinking about how to mitigate its risks.” Even more recently, Hinton has said that we must add in maternal instincts into AI to ensure it cares about us as it grows smarter and more powerful. And he’s not alone. Bill Gates, who once likened AI to the arrival of mobile phones or the internet, has also warned that we need to “guide its development so that it benefits humanity in the long term.”

But in practice, that’s not what’s happening.