AI Guides › Creative & Design
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Most of the advice around AI and creative work is about invention — new ideas, new drafts, new options from nothing. That's the flashy half of what these tools do and the half that gets talked about. The quieter, more useful habit is one most people already know they should do more of and almost never do, because it used to cost real time: going back over finished work and making another pass at it.
The rule: AI doesn't make you more original, but it makes iteration — another version, another angle, another pass at something you already made — cheap enough that you'll actually do it, and iteration is where most real improvement in creative work comes from anyway.
A first draft, a first sketch, a first cut has always been reasonably easy to produce. What's historically been expensive is the fourth version — the one that requires redoing work you've already done, with no guarantee the result is better. That cost meant most work shipped close to its first usable version, not its best one. Lowering the cost of another pass changes what actually gets shipped, without changing where the original idea came from.
Skip treating every extra pass as automatically an improvement — more iteration produces more options, not automatically better ones, and somebody still has to judge them. And skip iterating indefinitely once you're past the point of noticing real differences between versions — diminishing returns are real here too.