Stop using AI
to do your creative work for you.
Start using it to make your creative ideas work.
If you're looking for ways to get AI to do your creative work, you're in the wrong place.
the skinny
AI is not good or bad. It’s a thing. How you use it can make the work better or worse.
Are you a creative? Do you design or write stuff in exchange for money? Then if you ask AI to do the work for you, it's going to be worse than you (unless you're already not very good, I guess, in which case maybe creative work isn't for you, friend). AI isn't creative, you are. And why would you outsource the fun part, anyway?
“Same creative work. Less time. Smaller budget.”
That’s the promise getting sold to management, clients and anyone wondering whether they still need a creative department. It’s also a pretty reliable brief for AI slop.
AI can be useful to creatives. But you have to understand what it can add to the process before deciding what you can subtract.
Here’s my take on what makes your bot usage good or bad.
Expand your creativity
More of this
Use it as a mirror, assistant or to fill a gap
- Tell me where this idea matches the brief, and where it falls short.
- Generate images for concepts to get my vision across.
- Here is my data, these are my questions
- Build something I couldn’t otherwise make.
- Let me test the stupid idea before I kill it.
- Generate a writing prompt.
- Do the boring, repeatable shit so I can spend more time thinking.
Replace your creativity
Less of this
Ask it to do the thinking. Pretend the output is your work.
- “Give me a big campaign idea.”
- “Make this award-winning.”
- “Write me something funny.”
- Give it a job title and expect it to become that thing. ie: "You are an award-winning copywriter"
- Write "my" opinion piece on this topic.
- Use AI-generated people as a stand-in for the real people your brand wants to reach.
- Make everything faster, and more generic.
By the way
I absolutely built this site with my robot friend.
I can't code and didn't want to use a template, so I used AI to do the stuff I can't do.
Also I thought it would be a fun little show-and-tell on how I work with AI.
Experiments
Things made with robots. By a human.
01 Summer 2026
Experiment 01: Can AI help me make a new website in one day?
Peek behind the curtains to see how this very website was made!
Thinking
A human has opinions.
Essays, what-ifs and why-nots from inside human–AI collaboration. No breathless AI news. No seventeen prompts to supercharge your ideation. Just an old man shaking his fist at a cloud. Well, by old man I mean me and by cloud I mean AI slop and unrealistic expectations.
Work with me
Want to make AI useful without making the work boring?
I help creative people and teams develop a human-led way of working with AI through workshops, talks, creative sprints and consulting.
Who needs help?
This opens a message in your email app. No mysterious form void. No mailing-list ambush.
The human
Hi, I'm Bree.
I'm a creative director, writer, artist. I've spent my career turning insights into ideas. For the last 5 years I've been exploring how AI can help me as a creative, and I want to share what I've found works, and what is absolutely more destructive than helpful. I strongly believe that AI can never replace human creativity, but it is super useful (and fun!) in helping solve creative problems. And cause some as well, especially when people are looking for a magic create button to push.
One last thing
The future of creativity belongs to people with something to say and the taste to know when it's working.
Same as always.