I’ve been feeling a bit of creative drought lately, and at first I thought it was me. Then I looked around the industry and I see signs that this may be a more systemic problem.

Take a look at the rise of AI: big company antics in the space are well known, but there are a plethora of startups that’ve launched as little more than a shell script wrapped around an API call. Now the shell script has grown to “agentic” scale and makes several calls in the background, but they’re all implementing the same droll things.

Where is the whimsy? Where is the art? Where’s the stuff that makes you smile? Before people became accustomed to machines making up text, I could usually get a laugh by pointing folks at amazonsebwervices.com; while primitive by today’s standards, a mark of generator trained on AWS service announcements with a deterministic seed was just joyful. I don’t see the joy anymore, and it’s manifesting in my own work too.

I feel like collectively we’re in a slump. It’s easy to blame the horrid state of politics, but that’s not anything new. The world has always been ending.

There are bright light exceptions; there’s great beauty and creativity in a number of television shows lately (Murderbot, Andor), but day to day the world feels like it’s becoming grayscale. It’s odd: just when GenAI improves to a point where computers can offer a form of creative inspiration on tap, the world somehow becomes flatter. I’m not advocating for outsourcing our thinking, but these tools are great at the “yes, and” improvement around the germ of an idea.

Alternately, maybe I’m the one who’s changing, and I just don’t see the everyday magic anymore.