Reflecting on Pablo Stanley's Talk: Secret of Creativity, AI and Design

Pablo Stanley's talk on creativity, AI, and design was one of the most honest conversations I've heard about what the current moment actually feels like for working designers. Rather than either utopian enthusiasm or defensive anxiety, he offered something more useful: curiosity mixed with rigor.

A few things he said have stayed with me.

Creativity Isn't Threatened — It's Being Relocated

One of Pablo's central arguments was that AI doesn't diminish creativity — it changes where creativity lives in the process. When generation is cheap and fast, the creative act shifts upstream: to framing, to curation, to the quality of the questions you ask.

This resonates with what I see in teams. The designers who are thriving with AI tools aren't the ones with the best prompting technique. They're the ones with the clearest sense of what they're trying to say — what feeling they want to create, what problem they're solving, what's true about the people they're designing for.

The Value of Taste

Pablo talked about taste as the thing AI cannot replicate — and I'd go further and say it's the thing that becomes more valuable as AI becomes more capable. When anyone can generate competent design artifacts, the ability to distinguish good from great, appropriate from merely acceptable, becomes the differentiator.

Taste isn't innate. It's developed through exposure, reflection, and critique. Designers who invest in developing their aesthetic and conceptual sensibility now are building a durable advantage.

On Authenticity and Voice

Perhaps the part of Pablo's talk I found most generative was his reflection on voice. AI-generated work tends toward the average — it synthesizes what exists. Human creative voice comes from specificity: from a particular perspective, a particular set of experiences, a particular way of seeing.

• What is your actual point of view as a designer?
• What do you notice that others don't?
• What do you care about that isn't yet visible in your work?

These questions feel more important than ever. As generated content proliferates, human specificity becomes scarce and valuable.

What I'm Taking Into My Own Practice

I left Pablo's talk wanting to spend more time in the parts of creative work that feel hardest — not the generation, but the discernment. The editing. The asking of better questions. The cultivating of genuine taste.

That's the work AI can't do for us. And in a world where it does more and more, it's the work that matters most.

"When generation becomes trivial, the creative act moves to the question you're asking."
— Paraphrasing Pablo Stanley