Is AI replacing creativity or accelerating it

Here’s a take that might ruffle some feathers: AI isn’t replacing creativity, it’s just killing the friction.

I’ve always felt that AI is a collaborator, a 'force multiplier' rather than a replacement. After years of living at the messy intersection of tech and storytelling, I’m more certain of that today than I was a decade ago. The bottleneck was never the 'Idea'. For the longest time, the real enemy of creativity wasn't a lack of imagination; it was the sheer exhaustion of execution. The cost, the time, the gatekeepers. If you wanted to be a filmmaker, you needed a small army and a mountain of cash just to see if a concept worked.

Now, that same creator can prototype a visual or a score in a few hours. That's not 'replacing' the artist; it's giving them a superpower. It allows us to cut the fluff and the heavy costs without losing the soul of the work. It’s why a kid in a small Indian town can now compete with a massive studio in Mumbai. The wall is finally coming down.

The creativity paradox: Why AI makes human taste more valuable, not less

The loudest fear about AI and creativity is also the least examined one. 'It will kill originality,' is the argument as if creativity were simply a matter of output, of words appearing on a page or images rendering on a screen. It isn't. Creativity is taste. It's the instinct that tells you a scene needs to sit in discomfort a little longer, or that one specific cultural reference will land like a gut-punch while another will fall completely flat. That instinct doesn't emerge from pattern-matching. It emerges from a life lived.

The research is starting to confirm what many practitioners already sense. AI-assisted stories rate higher on creativity and craft, but they converge. They become more similar to each other, more polished, less strange. The outliers disappear. The weird choices, the culturally specific risk, the decision to break a rule that most writers wouldn't even notice, remain stubbornly human. AI is a mirror, not a muse. It reflects the patterns of what has existed. The genuinely new still has to come from somewhere else. This distinction matters enormously for how we think about what's actually being disrupted.

The real flip isn't about speed

Something more structurally significant is happening beneath the surface-level conversation about efficiency. We are moving from manual creativity to conceptual vision and that shift changes the fundamental nature of creative work.

For Instance consider graphic design before AI: roughly 70% of the job was mechanical execution, resizing assets, reformatting decks, adapting templates and 30% was actual thinking. AI inverts that ratio. The throughput gains are real and dramatic: workers using AI tools see productivity increases equivalent to decades of natural gains compressed into months. But the more interesting number is this one; 69% of creative professionals report that AI gives them new ways to express their creativity, not replace it. That's not an efficiency story its a reorientation of what the work actually is.

The strategist who used to spend half her week reformatting presentations can now spend that time on the idea itself, on the why, not just the how. The writer who used to burn hours on research logistics can spend that energy on the specific, strange, culturally loaded detail that makes a piece unforgettable. This isn't marginal. It's a fundamental change in where human judgment gets applied, and therefore in how much of the work is actually irreplaceable.

The steering wheel principle

The productive frame isn't human versus machine. It's closer to this: the machine handles the engine, the human holds the steering wheel. And what that means in practice is that the people who thrive in this transition won't be the ones who use AI to do more of the same thing faster. They'll be the ones who understand that taste, judgment, and the willingness to make the uncomfortable or unexpected choice are now the scarce inputs that the engine cannot supply.

When photography showed up in the 1800s, painters thought it was the apocalypse. But it didn't kill art; it pushed it. It forced painters to move past literal drawings and invent things like Impressionism and Abstraction, things a camera couldn't 'see.' AI is doing that to us right now. It’s forcing us to be more human, to lean into the nuance and the "rebellion" that a machine can't replicate.

The panic about AI killing creativity misunderstands the threat and misidentifies the asset. The real creative risk has never been execution. It's always been a vision knowing what's worth making, and why, and for whom. That hasn't become less important. It's become the whole job.

The LVS perspective

What we certainly know is that AI doesn't dream. It doesn't understand why a specific pause in a film makes you cry, or why one word choice in a line of dialogue changes everything. It can optimize for what has worked. It cannot feel what needs to exist.

That gap between pattern and purpose, between output and meaning, is where LVS lives.

This philosophy isn't something we arrived at abstractly. It's why we built what we built. We've watched the creative industry contort itself trying to answer the wrong question: how do we compete with AI? The right question is simpler and far more demanding: What becomes possible when humans finally stop doing the work that was never really theirs to do?

The next decade won't be won by whoever has the cleverest prompts or the fastest pipeline. It will be won by the people and studios who have the clearest vision, the sharpest taste, and the courage to make the strange, specific, uncomfortable choice that no model would generate on its own. The ones who understand that creativity was never about volume. It was always about the thing only you could see, and the conviction to make it real.

AI isn't the end of the creative era. It's the beginning of the one where only the truly creative survive and thrive.

This article is penned by Danish Devgn, Founder & CEO, Lens Vault Studios; Co-founder Prismix Studios