[비평] Yours, Sincerely: On Creativity After AI

In the last week of February, Cintrini Research and Alap Shah released an article titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”.⁴ Packaged as a speculative thought-experiment, it imagines how rapid AI adoption could produce a sharp structural shock two years down the road. The article goes on to describe a bleak outlook for the global economy and workforce due to the world being unable to keep up and adapt in contrast to the disruptions brought about by how fast AI is progressing.

Citadel Securities, one of the world’s largest trading firms, responded quickly the very next day with an article of their own debunking many “fictitious” claims and projections the Cintrini article laid out.⁵ It argued that historically, productivity shocks would act as a complement instead of a substitute. But the damage was already done. Cintrini’s original article had spread across the financial and tech circles on social media like wildfire. The doomsday-heralding sentiment was heard far and wide, and made tangible when it left a dent on the stock market due to notable panic sell-offs from investors. 

Just a few days later, Block, the parent company of fintech solutions such as Square and Cash App,  announced that it would lay off more than 40% of its workforce, citing AI-induced productivity as the deciding factor. Jack Dorsey, who founded the company after leaving Twitter, explains this decision in a post on X:

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.⁶

This led to a 20% spike of their stock price within the very same day. Unlike previous examples of large global tech companies that have gone through similar layoffs and saw their stock tank, this incident stands out in contrast due to how much they emphasise the importance of AI in its future processes; and based on the results, investors seem to agree — believing that productivity brought about by AI will translate into more profit.

Several experts agree and have already warned that other companies simply cannot afford to ignore this example, and may follow suit in one way or another. Others on social media have started referring to this as “Cintrini-esque”, referencing the doomsday scenario that has started to manifest itself into reality, and eventually shaking up the industry as a whole. This dread hits especially close to home, with how fast the series of events has occurred and how much faster the market has reacted.

The point I’m trying to make here is simply that the progress of AI can no longer be ignored. Much like every major technological disruption before, once the genie is out of the bottle there’s no turning back. The reality is that people are betting on the capabilities of AI one day catching up to and even outperforming what only an experienced team of workers were once capable of. This is simply how things are when the value equation is shifting.

Artistic & Artificial Intelligence

The morning after the APE CAMP ended back when I participated in 2024, a large group of campers gathered at the lobby of the hotel we had stayed at, checking out and leaving our luggages with the concierge to come back for later in the day. After visiting an exhibition that was being held at Culture Station Seoul 284, several of us pondered what art movement would come after this current wave of new media. Jokingly, someone suggested “post-AI”, noting the trending obsession with AI and the further implications on what it means to create art.

Since the advent of GPTs being made widely available to the public, countless claims have threatened to doom the creative industry and make certain job scopes and roles redundant, such as writing, drawing and photography, to name a few. Just the other day, a colleague of mine was on YouTube trying to explain a video she had just watched and was hit by a series of blatant adverts making use of graphics, voiceovers and videos generated with the help (this is being generous) of AI.

What’s really curious, is that thinking about it now, I have no recollection whatsoever of the advert nor the brand, nor what it was really about, other than the fact that it was clearly heavily produced with generative AI.

Dylan Field, the CEO and co-founder of Figma, predicted that the involvement of gen AI will be inversely proportional to the intended lifespan of an artifact.⁷ What he means by this is that content or products, be it an article, a film or an application that is meant to be relevant for longer periods of time, will ultimately require more human input.

Think of it this way; something created with intention and care carries a completeness that is instinctively recognisable, and because of that, is more likely to find a place within our memory or become a topic of discussion. In contrast, something that is fully generated typically turns out results that are as generic as it gets, and is likely forgotten just as quickly as it took to produce.

This notion was echoed by the previous Chief Design Officer of Apple, Jony Ive, in his design philosophy that humans can sense care, and more often than not, the lack thereof.⁸ Describing it as the “respect that we have for each other”, he argues that there is a certain level of expectation for something that is meant to be consumed and or used by humans, and that people can tell the difference when something is made carelessly without thought.

Going back to the unmemorable adverts getting in the way of YouTube videos, what we witness in the age of attention warfare and quick dopamine fixes is that generative AI is frequently used to rapidly produce content for mass consumption, opting for high output over polish. This is by no means an accident, but rather a predictive outcome of engagement-based ranking and ad-driven monetisation. We’ve seen this before in clickbait videos and formulaic listicles that populated the internet back in the 2010s — AI just evolved this concept.

While writing as the editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson popularised the term Long Tail by describing highly niche and automated content that targets obscure search queries to dominate SEO or social feeds.⁹ Another common characteristic of Long Tails are that they typically consist of the majority (even up to 90%) of searches done by users, cultivating the perfect conditions for content strategies that produce relatively high rewards with next to zero effort.

The unofficial term for such high-volume, low-effort AI generated content catered for capturing attention or ad revenue as opposed to delivering depth and originality is “AI slop”. As a testament to its infamy, slop has officially been named the word of the year in 2025 by the Merriam-Webster dictionary.¹⁰ Examples of these can be found on most social platforms such as YouTube, where currently a third of Shorts shown to new users were classified as slop or brainrot content.

On one hand, rapidly mass produced content is the direct result of value being determined by the scale of output. Many creators on social media platforms churn out tens of videos at a time, hoping to spam their way into virality as it only takes one random video with an absurd amount of views to make a quick buck.

And on the other, when attention is such a limited commodity in our busy lives, we tend to spend more of our precious time on things that are real, and heartfelt. While this short-form satisfaction might placate consumers’ interests for the time being, real lasting impact cannot be delivered without intent and care; critics have argued that such content is quickly consumed and forgotten, rarely building influence or meaning. This is the kind of value that cannot be determined, but rather registered on a deeper level.

Tell Your Story

Morgan Housel, a New York Times bestselling author, once wrote:

Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.

We all think we know how the world works. But we've all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.¹¹

And this couldn’t have been more true. From my time with cross-border opportunities, I found myself extremely fortunate to have met incredible people from all walks of life; artists, lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers, and much more. Combined with the fact that they came from such diverse cultural backgrounds, the exchange of experiences and knowledge widened my worldview in ways I’ve never imagined possible. 

Thinking back on my experiences in the aforementioned programs, I’m reminded of how ignorant I was of many things I thought I knew about the world. As a chronically online zillienial, access to both mainstream and unconventional media painted a picture I’d readily accepted to be complete. Only after listening to the firsthand accounts of others living vastly different lives from mine, did I start to comprehend how some previously unfathomable realities existed as their histories.

It wasn’t an epiphany that came out of nowhere in the midst of those exchanges. This realisation actually came long after the programs ended. Whenever an incident appeared on the news, it simply used to be a headline that was easily dismissed with the swipe of a thumb. Now it feels much closer, like an emergency that someone I personally know is going through. The rest of the world doesn’t feel so distant anymore. It simply became more personal.

As a designer, I’ve always resonated with this notion that to design is to create for others. We create because we care about the experience of someone else. It could be for the people that you know, or it could be for others that you might’ve never met (and oftentimes probably never will). Because of that, designing is first and foremost understanding and sympathising with what it means to be human.

With how much generative AI has evolved over the years, the effects are undeniably incredible. It has compounded our abilities and brought convenience to our fingertips like never before; someone who doesn’t speak a word of the language can appear fluent, a non-technical person can develop and deploy applications as a one-man team, and convincing photoshoots can be done without ever being in front of a camera. 

Despite the taglines you may have come across online, AI is far from being the antithesis of creativity. Ironically, it is probably the most powerful creative tool we’ve ever come across in our lifetime. It acts as a catalyst, collapsing the distance between imagination and execution. However, as intelligent as tools come, they carry the burden of how we use them, not the consequences that follow after.

OpenAI recently unveiled their latest model, GPT 5.4, which boasts a context window of 1,000,000 tokens.¹² You could dump a book over 2,000 pages thick, which is about the size of an entire volume of an encyclopedia, on its metaphorical lap and ask questions about its contents instantly. AI has the exposure to all the global information it could possibly ever need, and yet, without guidance it always defaults to the most statistically familiar settings which eventually fizzles out into background noise.

What makes something resonate is not merely how it was created, but why. Oftentimes the fine line between something uncanny and something unforgettable is the human story embedded within. AI helps us build faster, think wider, and explore further — but it does not understand which stories are worth telling, and why they need to be heard. These stories are what help us relate with one another, and what keeps us grounded.

As the world around us increasingly optimises for output, the most unique advantage we hold as creatives is perspective. This means that all of our lived experiences we’ve learnt from one another; the contradictions, the conflicts, the moments of doubt and growth are essential parts of our story.

That is value that can never be generated, and perhaps was never “non-essential” to begin with.

[각주]

1) The Straits Times, “8 in 10 Singaporeans willing to pay more for essential services,” 2020. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/manpower/8-in-10-singaporeans-willing-to-pay-more-for-essential-services