POV: In a “sea of sameness”, taste and storytelling will become vital creative skills

Surrounded by all the fear and concern that generative AI has brought to the creative world over the past year, David Lee feels like a sunny island of optimism and positivity. “Creativity might be the only job left in the future, full stop,” says the CCO of Squarespace, who has been in post for over 11 years, and who during that time has presided over some of the brand’s most iconic creative output, from a Superbowl ad with Martin Scorsese to a holiday campaign starring Oscar the Grouch.

When he talks about “creativity”, David doesn’t just mean it in the narrow sense that the creative industry defines it – “creative” roles such as illustrators, designers and animators. For David, “creativity is everyone’s job, and there are creative people in every field.” However, behind this uplifting message is a warning for everyone in every field, as we tread further into the realm of artificial intelligence. “If you wake up one day and you realise that you’re doing the same repetitive task over and over again, I would be very worried,” David cautions. “Anything that’s data analysis or research-based is just going to be done better by machines.”

The challenge for all of us, he argues, is to “move upstream”. Stop trying to compete with the things that AI can do well now, and will do really well in the future, and “embrace what makes us different”: in other words, our creativity, our ability to come up with original ideas, and to tell stories. If we do this, David says, then AI could lead to “the next golden age for humanity, where humans can do the things that we are actually meant to do”.

At Squarespace, David has tasked his team with exploring and experimenting with every new AI tool out there, from OpenAI to Midjourney to Stable Diffusion. For now, they mainly use these tools to condense the “middle part” of a project, after an idea has been developed but before they move to actually producing a final film or piece of creative. AI isn’t a replacement for ideas, but “once you have that idea, you can validate it so much more quickly,” David explains. Instead of pulling together dozens of references for lighting, character, composition and location, for instance, “we can just prompt and create that world”, he says, describing this as a process of “rapid prototyping”.

For now, AI tools aren’t very helpful at either end of the creative process: during the idea-generation phase and the final production phase. When it comes to idea generation – or in other words, the decision of what exactly to rapid prototype – David still feels this is a fundamentally human process. “Just because you have a blank text field, and you can create anything, doesn’t mean you’re going to create anything good,” he says. “You still need to have the references in your head, you need to have more inputs to have better output.”

This is why he focuses so much on searching for inspiration, and for David, the “inputs” have to come from outside of your immediate bubble. “You have to take yourself out of your world,” he says. “All the social platforms are trying to keep you in their walled gardens and trying to serve you content that you spend 1.5 seconds longer on than the last post. You can very easily get into a sea of sameness.” His advice is to go to a museum or an art gallery (he’s speaking to me via Zoom from the Venice Biennale), or even to simply have an impromptu conversation with a stranger. As he puts it: “You’ve got to take yourself out of your context and then bring inspiration back into your context.”

There is no easy shortcut to inspiration or great ideas. Essentially, this is because it comes down to taste and, as my colleague Elizabeth Goodspeed has written before, AI itself can’t generate good taste for you. Taste is a form of curation, of editing, and it’s based on all of the myriad “inputs” you’ve absorbed over time. Adam Moss, the legendary former editor of New York Magazine, has described being a good editor as “being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting or your heart is reacting” to a certain piece of work. The same can be said for curation and taste. For David Lee, this will be the most valuable capability in the age of AI: “Good taste is going to be the currency of the future.”

At the other end of the project – after the idea has been formed and validated – is the actual production phase. Again, here, AI is of little use to David and his team, because this is where “craft” comes into play. This is the stage when, he says, “we get all the people who are craftspeople together, and we actually shoot it… And guess what, it turns out it’s actually really hard to automate certain jobs,” he adds with a laugh. “Learning how to use your hands and having an applied skill is going to be really important in the future.”

David predicts a future where human craftsmanship and human creativity are valued above AI-generated content. “I actually believe all these AI tools will be for the masses,” he says. “People in the future will pay a premium for handmade craft and creativity, because there’s a story attached to it. People who can craft things with their hands, that will be the new luxury in the future.”

So, what does it truly mean for human creativity to become a luxury product? Fashion can serve as an instructive example here. Faced with a deluge of cheaper, more mass-produced products on the market, luxury fashion brands have typically turned to storytelling, both around the craft involved in making the product and the cultural cachet that comes from owning it. Luxury labels are incredibly good at storytelling: bringing a brand to life in a way that invites you as a consumer to engage with its history, production processes and design philosophy. As David puts it: “You’re buying it and you’re buying into the story, because you know a human made that and there’s a story attached to it.”

Perhaps, designers and creatives of all stripes need to get better at telling the stories behind their work. The trouble is, storytelling is a rare skill. “Designers in the future are going to need to be equal parts designers and storytellers,” says David. “Throughout my career, I’ve seen some of the best ideas left on the table, because the person wasn’t able to articulate their vision. And people need to be sold to, be convinced. It’s not enough to just put great work in front of someone; you need to be able to advocate for your work. And the storytelling part is massively important.”

However, one of the big unanswered questions here is around just how many designers and artists can, to use David’s phrase, “move upstream”. When something becomes a luxury good, it generally becomes a smaller niche (unsurprisingly, there aren’t as many Milanese artisan tailors as there once were). So, what David describes as “the next golden age for humanity” might not have space for everyone who is currently working in the creative industry. I really hope that’s not the case. What feels clear, though, is that, given we’re entering this world of AI-generated content, we would all do well as creatives to spend less time trying to do everything more and more efficiently and quickly, and spend a bit more on storytelling – advocating for our work and articulating why it’s not only valuable, but essential.