Plastic and Wood

Understanding the future of creativity and AI is really a discussion about materials. AI generated creative work is like plastic, human creative work is like wood.

That’s not meant to sound demeaning, to either one.

As a designer, I’ve been looking for an analogy that properly captures how I feel about creative work and where it’s headed with AI, and I haven’t found a better one.

Plastic gets used as shorthand for cheap and disposable, and sure, that captures something about AI generated creative work. But it’s not nearly the whole picture. Plastic is one of humankind’s most important inventions and it has objectively shaped the world for the better. It made it possible to sterilize medical products at scale: syringes, IV bags, catheters, the disposable glove. It made food last longer and travel farther. It made cars lighter, flights cheaper, and water clean in places it never was. If you removed plastic from the world tomorrow, life expectancy would fall off a cliff. Plastic is indispensable. Plastic can also feel high quality. The plastics that Apple, Braun, Dyson, Herman Miller and others use all feel premium.

AI for creative work is the same kind of invention. It can be cheap, it’s fast, and it’s already everywhere. But it genuinely expands what’s possible. If you invest in using it enough, it can even feel premium. Most importantly, it can often solve the cold start problem. The blank page, the empty canvas, the first ugly version. AI-generated starting points get you past all that and into iterations almost instantly, the same way injection molding let designers try a hundred shapes for the price of one carved prototype. In creativity, more iterations almost always means better work.

But plastic is not wood.

They share properties. Sometimes they’re interchangeable. Often they’re not. Wood has a feel in your hands that’s unmistakable. Its weight, the warmth it gives, the feel of its surface when it’s sanded, all of it makes you want to keep holding it. Nobody runs their palm across a plastic tabletop just to feel it. The grain of a walnut slab is a record of a specific tree in a specific place over decades, now made useful in a different way. Human creative work will always feel like that. A hand-drawn illustration where you can see the line hesitate. An essay where the writer’s actual personality leaks through the sentences. A song where voices crack and the beat and the lyrics intentionally don’t stay in sync at all times.

Wood, like human work, has an inherent authenticity.

Good analogies also challenge other mental models, and this analogy breaks one I’ve never quite liked: “human in the loop.” As a human, I can say the idea of being in a loop has never sounded liberating. Human in the loop feels too much like a hand-off. Two parties not really working together — one doing the work, the other approving it along the way. I think human-AI creative work can, at times, be that but can also be so much more. Parts human, parts intelligence, combined into something altogether different. And that’s why this analogy feels so spot on. Wood and plastic already work this way. Many of the most delightful products are part wood, part plastic, part metal, part whatever else. Think about a great standing desk. The tabletop is real wood, because that’s the part you touch and feel all day. The legs are steel, because steel is strong. And plastic handles everything else: the housing, the cable trays, the controller, the little cupholder. It’s just the best use of each material. The best creative work of the next decade will be built the same way.

If the analogy holds true then it, of course, implies something unsettling. Like plastic, AI creative work may come to dominate most of what looks creative to other people. This isn’t unique to AI. Stock photography already did this once: it replaced a huge amount of commissioned photography and illustration for anything that just needed to be good enough. We have seen its slop almost everywhere, well before AI. But AI generating creative work will do it again, at a much bigger scale, and to many more forms of creative work. It may become the dominant form, the way plastic is the dominant material. It is inevitable we will see a lot of AI slop in creative work, the same way we see plastic slop in cheap goods. Likely, landfills of it.

So this is where I’ve landed. Use the plastic. It would be silly not to. Not because resisting is futile or because everyone else will, but because, used the right way, like any material, it can make the work meaningfully better. But plastic isn’t and won’t be the only material. Use whatever material best works. I know, for certain, I’ll continue to use fine woods and other natural materials whenever is right.