A client told me last week that AI had "transformed their creativity." When I asked what they'd built with it, they showed me a marketing plan that read like every other marketing plan on the internet. That's not transformation. That's autocomplete with better grammar.

Roughly 5% of people are using AI in a way that's actually changing how they work. The rest have access to a very powerful tool but they're using it wrong.

A person with photographic memory isn't a genius. They can't write a beautiful poem or compose something that makes you cry. But they've absorbed everything they've ever seen and can recall it instantly. Impressive — but not creative.

That's what an LLM is. ChatGPT, Claude, all of them — a photographic memory that has read every book online. Or as I like to describe it: the best Scrabble player in the world. Knows every word. Every pattern. But it's not inventing language.

When people use these tools to "write" their novel or "create" their strategy, they're asking a Scrabble champion to write poetry. It's never going to be novel — it can only ever suggest something that has already been. It sometimes feels creative because it shows you something you hadn't seen yet. Great for getting from A to B.

But to do truly great things, you need your own thought, your own angle, and your own voice. AI is the most powerful recall and pattern-matching tool ever made. The creative part is still you.

Once you understand that, it becomes incredibly powerful. I have an idea on Monday and a working product by Friday — not because AI is creative, but because it handles everything between the idea and the execution while I focus on what matters: deciding what's worth building.

  • I've shipped two products in the last month using this exact approach. One of them is BigMoneyIdeas — it scores your business idea in two minutes. Try it with something you've been sitting on.
  • Next week I'm writing about what it actually looks like to build a product from zero in a weekend. The real version, not the LinkedIn version.

🎵 Cerrone — Supernature 1977. A song about what happens when we create something powerful and don't understand what it actually is. Still relevant.

— Nicc