🌏 How AI Will Unlock a New Era of Human Creativity

When I was 15, living amidst the cornfields of the rural Midwestern United States, I wrote an essay. 

A local civic organization was holding a writing competition, and children from schools in my area were encouraged to participate. The topic?

“Freedom: Our Responsibility to Preserve.” 

(Yes, for those of you outside the US, this was actually the topic.)

The sponsoring organization, called the Optimists Club, had chapters throughout the United States.

To my surprise, my essay won in our local chapter, then in our regional competition. Before I knew it, my parents received a phone call, informing them it was advancing to the national competition stage.

My essay, and I as a result, would represent the entire State of Illinois. 

Strangely, an essay by a girl in this tiny rural town (population 2500) had beat out all the essays from bigger towns and cities throughout Illinois. Including the entire population of Chicago.

This was quite a big deal for me, and within my local community.

There was a banquet held in my honor, a cash prize, a plaque with my name on it. Articles in the local newspapers.

My parents, teachers, and people in my hometown were proud.

This also meant I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the national convention, where I would meet fellow essay winners from the other 49 U.S. states. Wow!

We would be special guests for 4 days at the exotic location of… wait for it...

Valley Forge, Pennsylvania!

While not on everyone’s list of dream destinations, this was a place of significance in American history. We would attend special talks from experts at think tanks and government officials on a variety of topics.

And if this sounds like a big deal, consider this:

I had never been on an airplane before.

In other words, this was the nerd’s equivalent of winning a beauty pageant. 

One of the speakers whose talk most interested me was a futurist.

He was a special advisor to the U.S. President.

I didn’t know people had jobs like that.

I am the daughter of a factory worker.

All around me, most people worked physical jobs, or were teachers.

I was awestruck that a person could be paid to think.

Let alone about the future, and let alone advise the President on it.

I listened closely, feeling extremely fortunate to hear from someone with such rare expertise.

Macintosh Computers had just begun to enter my school system at the time, with their fun apple logo that felt like a perfect fit for education.

He explained that eventually, as we used those computers more and more, and the information we shared became digitized, we would store it and share it in new ways.

Once digital information could be shared more easily, he explained, it would lead to an era in which humans could work from home at their keyboards, and instead of using phone calls to call each other, we could connect in digital spaces.

(The internet did not exist yet.)

He explained that computers would get so small they would be injected into our bloodstreams.

He told us that as computers got easier to access, people would work from home a lot more, until for many it would become the default.

Most of what he said seemed far-fetched to the average person in the 1990s.

Some of the other essay winners even scoffed at his ideas after he left.

I actually believed him, and his ideas remained etched in my brain.

But he also said that as people worked at home more...

• They would grow tired of being tethered to a screen
• They would start to spend as much free time as possible outside of their homes.
• We would begin to crave more human interaction
• We would remember temporarily forget, and then remember what makes us human
• And we’d begin to miss it.

As an introvert, I questioned this part of his view of the future.

Sitting at a computer all day, thinking and creating, sounded pretty amazing to me.

But what he said next made my young eyes light up with hope.

He talked about how after we got through a spike of computers generating a lot of what humans could do at the time, it would spark a new era of human creativity.

As computers would take on more of what knowledge workers used to do, and creative outputs from computers would devolve into a sea of sameness:

human creativity would flourish

As he explained, humans would grow more aware of things generated by computers, and would better be able to discern true human creativity when they saw it.

To help us understand this, he gave us an example.

Imagine if anyone could write a song by simply telling a computer what they had in mind, he suggested.

Humans would soon grow tired of songs that were computer-generated.

Those wouldn't be novel anymore.

To hear ones that were truly unique and special, they would want a connection to the human creator, and evidence it was a real person.

They’d want to see the person up close, performing before their own eyes, and listening to the song in a venue with physical spaces and acoustics that couldn’t be replicated digitally.

That would be different, and special.

Not only would creative output rise.

So would appreciation for human-created works.

As he explained it, the potential creativity of humans is unique to each individual and unlimited, whereas machines would only be drawing from a pool of past creations from which to derive their output.

The true power of humans is creativity, and authenticity, he explained.

Humans have lived experiences and emotions, whereas machines do not. He saw this as the major factor that would allow humans to differentiate between human-crafted and machine-produced works.

He painted a picture of live musicians being in higher demand as a result, of live auditoriums filling up in record numbers.

He envisioned people going out to restaurants lured by a chef who loved to surprise her guests with something new and unpredictable each time.

After all, if every conceivable recipe created previously could be accessed and made from home, our very reasons for going out to eat would change.

And more culinary creations would arise.

He depicted a world of people valuing human creativity and distinctively human work differently than they ever had before.

To make his point with a parallel example, he mentioned how mass produced furniture was already becoming more accessible and cheaper.

Meanwhile, the prices of handcrafted furniture were going up faster than ever. He explained to us that the laws of supply and demand dictated that true human creativity would have a higher value in society than ever before.

The future he described was one that I wanted to live in. 

My grandfather was one of those carpenters the futurist described.

He sold the results of his own woodworking at local fairs on weekends.

I sometimes got to tag along.

It felt special when people discovered his pieces.

I felt so proud. He was making something so unique and special.

People saw value in them.

I hoped they would treasure them like I did.

They were happy to pay what I thought was a lot of money at the time for things they could never find in any store. Custom crafted, one of a kind creations.

Stamped with his name on the bottom.

A future where creativity could flourish resonated deeply with me.

My brother was an artist, my siblings and I played various instruments, my mother made most of my clothes, which I often helped design.

The creativity we embraced in our family and in my community was not uncommon – after all, we had very few stores nearby.

Making and creating things was normal, and often, necessary.

Coming from a family of creators, I could vividly envision the future he described:

• My brother's canvas paintings on display for people to see
• My sister's incredible piano skills being heard and appreciated by others
• My mother's paintings and embroidery and needlework and quilts being appreciated by more than just our family and friends
• My other grandpa's writings being made available for more people to appreciate his wit...

And so on.

Sitting in a room of other children my age from 49 different states, and places as distant and different from where I grew up as Alaska and Hawaii, the idea of digital connectedness, and the ability to stay in touch with these new friends appealed to me hugely.

I wanted this future immediately, right there and then. I didn’t want to have to wait.

Several decades have passed since that Valley Forge experience.

Most of the presidential advisor’s predictions have come true with surprising accuracy.

What I can’t convey in writing is the enthusiasm and joy with which he spoke to a room of 50 young essay winners.

The passion and hope he conveyed about the future of creativity, and a better world that day has stayed with me all this time.

As technology keeps evolving, it’s easy to play into fears about AI and technology displacing ways of doing things that we’re all comfortable with.

Our instinct for survival tells us to be skeptical of change, and to approach it with caution.

Ironically, humans also love the novel, and when brands and other humans offer experiences that catch us by surprise, stand out, and remind us we’re human, we tend to embrace them.

That tension we feel, between the pull of the new and the fear of change, is also incredibly human. While we have healthy skepticism over new technology and its consequences, our curiosity and hunger for progress usually tend to win out.

What I see today, now that I'm nearly half a century old myself, is that humans are blessed with levels of creativity that machines can only ever seek to emulate.

Humans are also defined by emotions, and informed by multi-sensory experiences that only humans can perceive.

These shape not only our creative output, but what makes it unique.

These also inform our judgment - how we intentionally curate what we see and hear. 

The predictions of the future I learned about back in Valley Forge have mostly come true.

And if the accuracy of that futurist’s predictions continue, a new creativity era is about to begin.

What’s exciting to me most of all is that our choices and creativity as humans are not ultimately pre-programmed, or determined by a set of algorithms.

How we use our power to not just create, but to choose which creations matter most, to shape the direction of our world, is up to us.

Back then, all I could dream of was leaving my small town and creating a very different future for myself. Not that my life was bad. I just wanted to get more out of it.

I knew that the world had a lot to offer, full of so many fascinating people and cultures.

I also knew that languages were a key to unlock oh-so-many doors, behind which access to untapped human knowledge and experiences sat in wait.

At the end of the day, I’m still that wide-eyed girl who grew up in the cornfields, imagining a better future, as painted by one of the best futurists the U.S. President could employ at the time. 

That's precisely part of my lived experience, which gives me a unique perspective, just like you have, and just like everyone else does in this world.

I believe that someday, we'll find better ways to take our unique perspectives and knowledge, unblock them from reaching people, and fuel a better world.

In summary:

No matter what happens with AI or any other disruptive technology,

I prefer to believe the power of human creativity will always win out,

and will ultimately make life better for many,

so that humans and the society we're creating can evolve. 

This is my daughter 11 years ago, in the crib my grandfather lovingly made for her in his woodshop, even though he was well into his late 80's at the time. She is wearing the christening gown that her great great grandmother made for my mother by hand.

The determined little look in her eyes gives this Mama hope that she and others from her generation will do what they can to fight for a better future for creators and democratized access to knowledge.

Grace Notes

1. I'm coming out with a new newsletter this week in which I'll address mostly marketing topics. If you work in marketing (and want to be a marketing leader someday), watch for the first edition on Monday.
2. Content shift: Instead of just covering international expansion topics, I'll be using this newsletter from now on for two purposes (1) to address a wider variety of topics that I think could be helpful to my readers. (2) to offer a more personal connection to my readers than I normally do in other places where I write. This edition is an example of both.
3. My reasons: I get a lot of requests to mentor people, give advice, and so on. But I just don't have hours in the day to meet with so many people 1:1. And, while I loved my stint as a graduate school professor, that too isn't easy when you have a full-time job at a fast-growing tech company. I'll continue to share what I can here, as a perhaps less individually impactful, but more scalable replacement.
4. The frequency of this newsletter may change. It might be less frequent, depending on what I have to share. I tend to write this on weekends, but of course as a mom of two young girls, those are always busy for me too.
5. You might have noticed that I changed the header image of this newsletter and added new photos. I tend to get new headshots whenever I write a new book or make some other major career change. I always feel strange about this, because such photos are done with full hair and makeup, the very best lighting, professional help, and definitely not what I look like after working crazy hours and showing up red-eyed on a Zoom call, as I more frequently do. But also, I've lost nearly 30 pounds since the original photo shoot for my previous book. Auto-immune diseases have their challenges. It's amazing what not being on prednisone after years of being on again, off again, for prolonged periods, can do. (If you're an auto-immune warrior like me, I send you my heartfelt respect for all you do every day that others who go through life blissfully healthy can never even begin to appreciate. I know your pain and honor your strength.)

Connect with Me

Thank you for reading this issue of my newsletter! I hope you found it helpful.

Here are 3 other ways we can connect:

1. Get my books

• Brand Global, Adapt Local, with Katherine Melchior Ray, comes out in just five months! This is a book I think every marketer will love! Brands build special relationships with millions of people, but taking one global is quite the journey.
• Take Your Company Global, was endorsed by executives from Microsoft, Harvard Business School, Calendly, and HubSpot. I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs bring their sometimes life-changing ideas and innovations to more parts of the world.
• Found In Translation, with Jost Zetzsche is a book honoring translators and language workers everywhere. If you want to get smart on large language models and understand some of the limits and possibilities of machines, you might want to read it. It will make you think. It was also published in Norwegian, Greek, and Russian. It was endorsed by individuals from National Geographic, Facebook, and Microsoft.

2. Schedule an author appearance

To book me for a keynote, author talk at your company, or virtual talk,

email me: nataly (at) borntobeglobal.com.

3. Simply reach out

If you want to collaborate in some other way, let me know.

If I can't help, I have a great network.

(Proof: you're in it!)

Message me here on LinkedIn, or email me: nataly (at) borntobeglobal.com.

You can also reach out directly on my website, Born to Be Global.

Thank you for reading!

Nataly