When Creativity Gets Separated From Creating
Plus, play a really weird version of chess created by an 8-year old
Watching the Oscars last Sunday, there was a moment that caught my attention. Will Arnett introduced Best Animated Short with a line about celebrating “real artists,” which was clearly a shot at AI. The Girl Who Cried Pearls won. It’s a 17-minute stop-motion film, and one of the filmmakers said it took five years to make.
What if they could have made that exact same movie in four years instead of five? What about one year? What about one week? Would the movie actually be worse? Or is there something about the toil and suffering to make the art that makes it great?
Part of why stop motion is impressive is knowing that real people touched real objects, moved them one millimeter at a time, and obsessed over tiny details for years. On some level, that is part of what we’re appreciating.
But if a tool lets an artist get the same result faster, is that bad? If someone with the same artistic vision, but no puppetry experience, can make a similar story, is that automatically less legitimate?
Now it’s important to mention that today AI cannot produce an Oscar-quality short film, and video models are not at that level yet. So, the above musings are more theoretical at the moment.
But models can make lots of things today. Already you may be seeing the same shift in companies you invest in or work at. These new abilities to create are changing how innovation happens.
My 8 year-old invented a new type of chess
To give an example of what can be done today, this week my 8-year-old son came up with a new chess variant called Evolution Chess. The rule change is pretty crazy: whenever a piece moves three times, it can evolve into a stronger version of itself.
Then, we designed the upgrades. What does a stronger bishop do? What does a powered-up knight look like? How do you make each upgrade feel exciting without turning the whole thing into nonsense?1
Then, after about an hour of vibe coding, we had the game.2 Here it is.
He thinks it’s amazing, and I think it’s pretty fun too. You really should try it if you like chess.
Of course, the interesting part is the lesson that if you can imagine certain things you can make them real, which would not have been true 6-12 months ago.3
Maybe we’re entering a world where ideas matter more than techniques
For all of human history until basically right now, creativity and execution were tightly linked.
If you couldn’t draw, the picture stayed in your head. If you couldn’t code or at least manage a team of coders, the game stayed an idea. If you didn’t know how to animate, compose, design, edit, or build, it was just another idea that never saw the light of day.
When a person had an idea outside their area of expertise, they could either spend years learning a skill, find someone else who already had the skill and pay them, or let the idea die. Most people chose the last option.
But now creation or at least high-quality prototyping is possible. And while you can debate whether the aesthetics of a piece of art are intrinsically tied up in the effort to create it, few people feel the same way about software. If it works and does what you need, then that’s great.
I should clarify that this also doesn’t mean AI makes everyone a creative genius. Most ideas are still not good at first and must be refined through painstaking iteration. Judgment and creativity are themselves still rare skills that must be honed.
This is changing how creation works in the business world
The business implications of this separation of creativity and creation are significant. Now, the person who sees a problem can increasingly build the first version of the solution.
A product manager can prototype a feature. A marketing manager can spin up a landing page and test positioning in an afternoon. Someone in operations can build a tool to improve a workflow instead of filing a ticket and waiting months. A founder can test a product idea before even hiring another employee.
Additionally, the whole process of discovery is changing rapidly. It used to be that to build a product or feature, you had to go interview tons of customers to understand their needs. Now you can build a prototype and get their reactions. I’m hearing this directly from companies. They are moving faster because they can make ideas tangible and get them in front of customers for quick reactions.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t need designers to build polished products or engineers to build production versions. AI isn’t nearly good enough to build enterprise software.
But people will be able to make their ideas a reality, and that will mean that organizations move faster, and more ideas come into existence. Humans then need to judge which ones are good.
What do you think? Are you seeing vibe coding play a role in prototyping at your companies? Any thoughts on Evolution Chess? Leave a comment or drop me a note.
Note: The opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the views of Berkshire Partners.
I can’t say if we succeeded or not. If you upgrade your queen, it becomes a Summoner Queen that can spawn new pawns. This is wild game!
In full transparency, it took an hour to get a playable version that follows the new rules. Then, we’ve been tweaking it for several more hours over the past few days as we realize that certain pieces are imbalanced, etc.
Also, this was a good distraction because my son also keeps claiming he has a design for an invisibility suit involving mirrors, and I won’t be able to vibe code that.