Small guts, big brains, and the creative’s trade with AI.

A couple of million years ago, we made a trade.

Our early ancestors swapped a large gut for a bigger brain by moving to better dinners. Add meat, figure out food processing, Bob’s your uncle and Lucy's your aunt – we spent less energy digesting. More energy growing our brains.

It was a good trade, albeit an accidental one. Offloading the mechanical to free up the generative. Aka thinking.

Which brings me, somehow, to AI.

Now by this point the decision isn't really whether to trade. It's WHAT you're trading away.

So much of creativity lives in the process. The trial and error. The failure.

Surprisingly there isn't a long German word for the joy of looking back at your early work and feeling both embarrassed and grateful for it. So I made one up: Rückschaufreude.

My early street photography was rubbish. My art college work now looks comical. My first agency website had featured a worn out Adidas shell toe trainer and swearwords.

And that's the point. Bad work = raw material for anything decent that comes later. Hand that over to a robot and you're not freeing up your creative brain, you're outsourcing the very thing that grows it.

Could the shortcut of AI creative expression reduce our ability to ideate, to wander, to be expressive – aka creative atrophy. Maybe. But I don't think it's binary.

I'm already helping clients use Claude to automate external documents – keeping their orgs on brand, at scale. The 'source of truth' (brand story, brand identity, brand guidelines) is created by humans. The robots take care of the mechanical.

Because the trade I want to make is exactly that: organisation, research, production-line consistency. The busywork that doesn't need a creative brain. The raw materials – the ideas, the failed attempts, the dirty neurons – for now those stay with me.

Don't let anyone else tell you what to trade. The AI gurus and the naysayers are loud enough already. Ignore both. Same as ever, it’s not a zero sum game. But it’s a game that requires you to get your hands dirty, to truly understand which trade you’re willing to make.