Machines can create, but are they creative?
AI can help with mood boards and mockups, but can it inspire? Calvin Ross Carl on why its output always lands just adjacent to your own thinking.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl responds to a viewer, Orion, who says AI is good for mood boards and example imagery but not for inspiration itself. Calvin agrees. He’s seen it used to pull reference material and drop designs into mockups, and he gets the appeal. But he never ends up inspired by anything it gives him, because whatever it spits back is just adjacent to what he’s already thinking.
Highlights
- AI can be useful for mood boards and mockups.
- It rarely, if ever, sparks real inspiration.
- Its output stays adjacent to what you already think.
Key insights
Useful isn’t inspiring
AI can speed up supporting tasks without ever producing the leap that makes creative work memorable.
Adjacent ideas aren’t new ideas
Because AI echoes what you bring to it, it can’t take you somewhere you weren’t already headed.
Detailed analysis
This exchange draws a practical line through the AI debate. Calvin doesn’t reject the tools; he places them. Gathering references and building mockups are optimization tasks, where AI fits. Inspiration is the innovation side of creative work, and output that sits right next to your own thinking can’t supply it.
Conclusion
Let AI help with the busywork. Look elsewhere for the spark.
Orion says here, “It’s good for mood boards, example imagery, but not for the act of inspiration itself. I’ve never felt inspired by a creative solution that GPT has spit out.” Yeah, I think that’s totally how people are often thinking about this, and I totally get it. Mood boarding stuff, it’s probably good for pulling things. I’ve seen people use it for design stuff, like throwing designs into mockups and things like that.
But I come back to the same thing you noted: I never end up being inspired by anything it spits back at me, because anything it spits back is just adjacent to what I’m thinking about.