To em dash or not to em dash: Retaining pride and craft in the age of AI

AI has rapidly changed the way designers, writers and creative teams work. Tasks that once required time, judgement and craft can now be generated in seconds. But as AI becomes increasingly capable of producing creative work, what happens to the human creativity behind it?

This talk explores how AI is changing the design process, web content and creativity more broadly — from the overuse of em dashes in AI-generated copy to bigger questions about authorship, originality, judgement and craft.

AI offers new ways to explore ideas, solve problems and produce work, but it also challenges some of the assumptions we've made about what creative work is for and where its value lies. If the tools become increasingly capable of producing competent work, how do we distinguish genuinely thoughtful creative decisions from simply accepting what the machine gives us?

And what happens to the skills we develop through the process of making — the experimentation, mistakes, dead ends, obsessive attention to detail and accumulated experience that shape creative judgement?

This isn't an anti-AI argument. Nor is it an argument that AI inevitably belongs in every creative workflow. Instead, it asks what we should hold onto when new technology makes it possible to remove more and more of the traditional process.

Because creativity isn't just about the thing that gets produced. It's also about the thinking, choices, skills and human effort that go into making it. In an age when machines can generate almost anything, retaining pride in the craft may become one of the most important creative choices we have.