In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo, “I’ve seen an Agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules.” This quote perfectly encapsulates AI’s primary limitation—humans write the rules, and AI follows them. AI operates within a rigid framework of rules, data, and algorithms, capable of processing vast amounts of information at lightning speed, but it is bound by those rules.

AI’s world is constrained by logic, while human imagination knows no bounds. AI can calculate, analyze, and organize with unparalleled efficiency, but it cannot dream, imagine, or create from nothing. Humans, on the other hand, possess limitless creativity and imagination.

When we encountered constraints, we invented tools to transcend them:

• We weren’t born with the ability to fly, so we imagined airplanes.
• We couldn’t move fast enough on foot, so we built cars.
• Our minds couldn’t store infinite amounts of information, so we invented computers and the internet.

These innovations—from planes to AI itself—are all products of human imagination. AI, the most advanced tool of our time, was born from our creativity and curiosity. But despite its sophistication, AI could never have imagined itself. AI is a byproduct of human ingenuity, not the source of it.

In my nephew’s world, garbage trucks can eat at McDonald’s, play basketball, and even fly. His imagination is limitless, and while AI can bring his ideas to life by generating images of flying garbage trucks, AI can't conceive that kind of creative vision without the human spark behind it.

This is the fundamental difference between AI and humans. AI follows the rules, but humans create new ones. Our capacity to dream and imagine what doesn’t yet exist is what makes us unique. AI doesn’t threaten that—it enhances it.

AI won’t replace human creativity—it will amplify it. By freeing us from mundane tasks, AI allows us to explore the depths of our imagination, push beyond the boundaries of possibility, and take our ideas to places we never thought possible. The real question we should be asking isn’t whether AI will replace us, but rather:

What does this make possible that wasn’t before?

In an article on Medium, Scott Belsky wrote that we are in "an era in which the friction between an idea and creatively expressing that idea is removed." This enables anyone to bring their ideas to life, regardless of technical expertise. While this is true, it can lead to the myth of effortless creativity—the belief that AI alone can generate great ideas and final products without meaningful human input.

The Basic Economics of Commoditization

Flights from LA to NYC are abundant and therefore cheap. When supply exceeds demand, value diminishes. On the other hand flying from LA to Sioux City is more expensive because the supply of flights is much lower, making each seat more valuable. Thus the LA to NYC flight is a commodity because there really are multiple airlines and multiple flights per day.

Similarly, when AI commoditizes creative execution by making it abundant and easy, it drives down the value of execution, while increasing the value of uniquely human tasks like ideation and innovation.

The Traditional Distribution of Effort in the Creative Process

Traditionally, the creative process was divided into two major stages:

1. Ideation: The generation and refinement of ideas. This includes activities such as brainstorming, outlining concepts, and creating wireframes or mockups.
   2. Execution: The transformation of ideas into final products, such as writing articles, designing detailed visuals, or coding functional websites or apps. Historically, execution required the most time, effort, and resources.

AI fundamentally alters this balance by eliminating friction in the execution phase.

The Three Types of Friction AI Eliminates

Historically, three types of friction constrained our ability to execute.

1. Resources: High-quality execution was often inaccessible without a large budget or a skilled team, forcing compromises in quality or overspending.

2. Technical Skills: Lacking the necessary expertise meant you either had to invest time in learning new skills or hire someone else to complete the task.

3. Time: Without resources or skills, the only option was to invest more time, which often came at the expense of quality or speed.

AI removes these limitations by making execution faster and more accessible. It democratizes access to powerful tools and capabilities, eliminating the need for extensive resources, technical expertise, or long hours. With execution becoming so streamlined, however, the real creative challenge shifts toward a different area.

The Redistribution of Effort in the Creative Process

AI makes execution frictionless, but it doesn’t make creativity effortless. While AI reduces the technical and logistical barriers to executing an idea, the creative process still requires significant mental effort — it’s just redistributed. Instead of focusing on manual tasks, the new creative effort shifts to ideation, critical thinking, and strategic refinement.

What once took weeks or months can now be done in minutes or hours. However, transforming something from generic to exceptional still relies heavily on human intuition, ingenuity, and refinement - skills that AI doesn't possess.

The New Effort to Outcome Ratio

The effort-to-outcome ratio highlights the relationship between how much effort is required for a given action and the result it produces. With AI, the execution process becomes faster, but the overall human effort isn’t reduced—it’s redistributed to more strategic areas.

In high-value creative work, more effort shifts to thinking and strategizing rather than execution. Human insight drives the meaningful refinement of AI-generated ideas, ensuring that the final product is aligned with the overall vision.

The Myth of Effortless Creative Execution

For those who buy into the myth of effortless creativity, the process seems simple:

1. Have AI generate an idea
2. Execute with a quick prompt

However, this oversimplification results in subpar creative work. While AI can write a blog post or create an image in seconds, the quality, substance, and emotional resonance of the work often fall short without meaningful human input.

Machines can assist in executing creative tasks, but the human edge remains in the ability to think abstractly, innovate, and bring emotional depth to the process. And you can see this in the contrast between AI-generated and AI-enhanced content.

• AI-Generated Content: This process is mostly automated — type in a prompt, and AI does the rest. It’s efficient but lacks depth, critical thinking, and emotional resonance. People using AI this way focus more on task completion than exploration and innovation.

• AI-Enhanced Content: In this approach, humans collaborate with AI as partners. AI supports execution, but humans guide and refine the process. This dynamic interaction leads to more nuanced, meaningful content, where AI handles the mundane, and humans contribute creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking.

In this way, AI-enhanced content transcends the limits of what AI can do alone, blending technology’s speed and efficiency with the heart and soul of human creativity.

As Scott Belsky said, “We must spend our hours where we have a competitive advantage over machines: developing new ideas, expressing old things in new ways, innovating processes, and crafting the story that infuses our creations with meaning.” AI might generate the initial idea, but the true value of creativity comes in the execution — where humans refine, iterate, and bring the idea to life.

While AI can make tasks more efficient, the human touch elevates the work, ensuring that it resonates with depth, emotion, and purpose. In the end, AI amplifies human effort, but it doesn’t replace the sweat and rigor that makes creative work truly exceptional.

The magic of human-AI collaboration lies not in effortless execution but in the persistent drive to refine, improve, and elevate the work beyond what either could achieve alone.

The Reality of Creative Execution

As Scott Belsky said, “We must spend our hours where we have a competitive advantage over machines: developing new ideas, expressing old things in new ways, innovating processes, and crafting the story that infuses our creations with meaning.” AI might generate the initial idea, but the true value of creativity comes in the execution — where humans refine, iterate, and bring the idea to life.

While AI can make tasks more efficient, the human touch elevates the work, ensuring that it resonates with depth, emotion, and purpose. In the end, AI amplifies human effort, but it doesn’t replace the sweat and rigor that makes creative work truly exceptional.

The magic of human-AI collaboration lies not in effortless execution but in the persistent drive to refine, improve, and elevate the work beyond what either could achieve alone.

When it comes to producing exceptional creative work, few people can compare to Ryan Holiday. In his book, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making an Marketing Work that Lasts, he emphasizes that true artistry requires dedicated effort to generate, refine, and develop ideas that endure. While AI can assist with execution, it doesn’t replace this effort. In fact, AI makes the four principles for creating a perennial seller even more crucial.

Commitment to the Creative Process

“To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process,” says Ryan Holiday.

In other words, you’re not going to create a perennial seller by typing a prompt into ChatGPT and having it spit out the next New York Times bestseller. So, what role does AI play in this process? When you view AI as a partner rather than just a tool, it becomes an effective sounding board and thought partner. AI enhances the creative process, but only when you don’t expect it to do all the heavy lifting. Relying on AI alone and asking it to “make something better” without your active input means missing out on the opportunity to develop a significantly stronger final product.

For example, I could have easily said, “I have this idea for a book, write the outline,” and started writing from there. But in doing so, I would have overlooked the second essential principle of creating a perennial seller: understanding your audience and positioning.

Positioning and Audience Understanding

“It’s not that hard to make something we want, or something we think is cool or impressive. It’s much harder to create something other people not only want, but need,” says Ryan Holiday.

It’s easy to have an idea, start working on it, and then realize after months that you’ve been heading in the wrong direction. While working on something you care about is important, commercial creative work requires that you deeply understand your audience.

In the publishing industry, by the time most authors sign their first book contract, they've already demonstrated that there's an audience for their work. Publishers don't create the demand for your work, they capitalize on the demand you've already created for it. That's why Seth Godin says that the marketing for your book starts years before you write it.

The old adage “if you create something for everybody, you create something for nobody” holds true. Whether you’re launching a product or writing a book, you have to answer two critical questions: “Who is this for, and what problem does this solve for them?”.

The Role of AI in Positioning

After reading Simple Marketing for Smart People, I realized I needed to understand what beliefs people needed to have in order to see my Maximize Your Output course as valuable. After jotting down an initial set of beliefs, I realized those beliefs had to be linked to specific behaviors.. This is when I turned to AI.

While AI can play a significant role in enhancing the creative process, its true value comes through human oversight and intuition. Understanding audience needs and refining ideas into viable, marketable content is a distinctly human task. AI can generate ideas and organize information, but the nuances of human emotions, cultural context, and market dynamics remain the domain of human creativity. This partnership ensures the final output is both innovative and deeply resonant with its intended audience.

Purpose and Intention: The Human Element AI Cannot Replace

When my nephew started talking in November, I kept a running list of his growing vocabulary in Mem. This list became the foundation for a personalized book I gave him for Christmas. My sister mentioned that the best gift I could give him for his second birthday would be another custom book.

My intention was to create a personalized book that supported his learning while capturing his imagination. I focused on themes he loved—garbage trucks, stories where he’s the hero, and elements of his current obsessions. The goal was to craft an engaging learning experience that aligned with his developmental stage.

While I used AI to generate images and come up with creative ideas, AI alone could never have conceived this because it lacks the personal touch and deep understanding of individual nuances that only a human can provide.

AI can't generate the purpose and intention behind creative work.  Human input gives projects relevance, meaning, and personal resonance. While AI might help with the execution, it cannot replicate the passion, emotional depth, or unique insights that humans bring to their work.

Feedback and Iteration: AI as a Thought Partner

One of the most undervalued aspects of creativity is feedback. We’re often too close to our work to see its flaws, which is why authors and creatives seek out editors and trusted collaborators. Similarly, AI can serve as an invaluable partner in providing feedback—but it’s not just about typing, “Make this sound better.” AI’s true value lies in pushing your thinking forward and helping guide you through your creative blind spots.

Using AI to Ask Questions and Challenge Assumptions

The difference between asking AI to improve something and having AI ask you questions is subtle but crucial. By transforming the interaction into a two-way conversation, AI enhances the creative process.

For example, during our audio discussions, I’ll talk to ChatGPT for 30 minutes at a time, and through this back-and-forth, new insights emerge. I ask questions, comment on responses, and challenge the direction, allowing AI to act as a thought partner.

This interaction isn’t one-sided; it leads to entirely new ideas. The back-and-forth dialogue fosters a dynamic and evolving creative process, with AI acting as an interactive tool rather than a passive one.

The Power of Critical Feedback

AI is great at providing objective, critical feedback when you specifically ask for it.. If you challenge AI to be ruthless in its critique—like pretending it’s the world’s best copywriter—it can help. It will pinpoint areas of improvement. For example, I’ve asked AI, ‘What sucks about this copy? Be brutal and harsh enough to make me want to cry,’ and it helps uncover flaws I hadn’t noticed.

• Objective Insight: AI offers unbiased critiques, highlighting weaknesses you might miss.

• Enhanced Creativity: Receiving tough feedback forces creative problem-solving, helping to refine your work.

• Skill Development: Embracing criticism and challenging AI to push you further helps develop creative resilience and mastery over time.

Ultimately, AI amplifies the human creative process, but only when the human remains deeply engaged in guiding, refining, and pushing the work to its full potential.

Take Your Creative Process to the Next Level 

Learn how to integrate AI-driven execution with human ideation. Get our comprehensive guide straight to your inbox.

The Recursive Creativity Loop is a 6-stage framework for human-AI collaboration that moves beyond AI's first response into richer, more refined creative work. Creativity is rarely linear, and this framework alternates between divergence and convergence, resulting in an iterative cycle—known as the recursive creativity loop—where humans and AI build on each other’s strengths.

The loop is the engine behind human-AI interaction and drives first, second, and third-order outputs, pushing creative work from generic to exceptional. Within the loop, humans take on different roles—guide, critic, and curator—at various stages to direct the process.

Note: The recursive creativity loop for this article consisted of roughly 350-400 prompts and responses.

AI Excels at Divergence, Humans Excel at Convergence

When humans engage in divergent thinking, it's akin to learning by exploration—gathering knowledge from diverse sources such as books, podcasts, and conversations. This diversity enriches our thinking. As Robert Greene mentioned in our conversation about Mastery, “The more species you have in an ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem is.” In a similar way, the broader our inputs, the more enriched our mental ecosystem becomes.

AI excels at divergent thinking because it can generate countless possibilities, directions, and ideas at an incredible scale and speed. It can produce vast amounts of content or options in seconds, like generating 100 blog post titles. However, it’s human insight that refines those ideas through the process of convergence—where we filter, connect, and synthesize information to create something meaningful.

For example, let’s say AI generates 100 potential blog post titles. Divergence happens here—AI offers a wide range of possibilities. But convergence, the real magic, happens when you apply human knowledge and insight to refine those options. You might use the principles from a book like Made to Stick to evaluate and filter out the weaker ideas, leaving you with the most compelling titles.

This isn’t just about coming up with the right prompt. It’s also about the acquisition, encoding, and retrieval of knowledge:

As the process moves from divergence to convergence, humans naturally take on roles as guides, critics, and curators—leading the exploration, critiquing the results, and selecting what to refine and finalize.

Understanding the Shift Between Guide, Critic, and Curator

To effectively leverage the recursive loop, humans must fluidly transition between the roles of guide, critic, and curator:

Guide
At the beginning, humans act as the guide by setting the vision and direction. This is where you give the initial prompt, but being an effective guide means knowing how to frame the right questions and objectives to steer AI effectively.

Critic
As the critic, you’re the one applying judgment and discernment. Think of this role as an editor: You evaluate the AI’s outputs, point out the flaws, and suggest areas for improvement. This role drives the iteration stage and ensures that the work is polished and aligned with the original vision.

Curator
Finally, the curator makes the final selections. This role is the most subjective, requiring taste and experience to decide what makes the cut and what doesn’t. It’s here that your intuition, taste, and experience come into play, determining which ideas get developed further and which are discarded.

By understanding and mastering these roles, you can maximize the potential of the recursive creativity loop, ensuring that both human and AI strengths are fully leveraged to produce exceptional creative work. Equally important is understanding how the importance of each role shifts depending on the industry or product.

How the Recursive Loop Impacts Output

The recursive creativity loop serves as an antidote to the common problem of generic, first-order AI-generated content. By forcing multiple iterations, the loop moves beyond shallow outputs to generate nuanced, contextually rich, and human-aligned creative work.

Together, these dynamics—multiple iterations, the interplay of divergent and convergent thinking, and increasing contextual awareness—ensure that the loop consistently produces refined, relevant, and innovative creative outputs that surpass the limitations of initial AI responses.

Examples of the Recursive Creativity Loop in Action

The Recursive Creativity Loop can be seen in real-world projects, where human ideation and AI-enhanced execution come together to create breakthrough results. Below, we explore how this loop plays out in two different industries: Apple’s cutting-edge product launch and Marvel’s next big cinematic universe. These examples illustrate how the guide, critic, and curator roles are essential to driving creativity forward.

Apple is Launching a new Product

Let’s say Apple is launching a wild, sci-fi-level product called the Apple NeuralSync Lens. Imagine a contact lens with built-in microchip technology that seamlessly syncs with your neural pathways for a fully immersive augmented reality experience. It sounds straight out of a futuristic novel, but Apple is known for pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Note: I had AI come up with the most out-there, sci-fi scenario possible, just to show how this could work.

In this case, the guide’s role is critical because they set the overarching vision and ensure the product stays aligned with Apple’s ethos. Without a clear guide, the product could veer off track and lose its core identity.

Marvel is Releasing a New Film

Now let’s switch gears to Marvel. They’re creating a new cinematic universe with a modern interpretation of the Mahabharata, packed with rich characters, epic storylines, and the kind of world-building Marvel fans expect. The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic, contains a wealth of complex characters and plotlines that could easily form the basis of a cinematic universe, much like Marvel’s current franchises. Here’s how the roles in the recursive creativity loop would shift:

In Marvel’s case, the curator (the director) plays the most crucial role in bringing the entire vision together. While AI could assist in concept generation, refining dialogue, or even suggesting different iterations of a scene, it’s the director’s role to decide what resonates emotionally and aligns with the film’s vision.

Dialogue as the Medium for Convergence

When we move away from the traditional command-and-control dynamic between humans and AI, it becomes clear that dialogue is the key to effective convergence. Put simply, the more you talk to AI like you would with a human, the more productive the interaction becomes.

A real conversation between humans isn't one-sided. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a long-winded lecture or a parent’s tirade, you know how ineffective that can be.

A meaningful conversation is a back-and-forth exchange that allows ideas to evolve, questions to be asked, and clarifications to be made. The same applies to interacting with AI. An iterative dialogue—comprising questions, answers, and commentary—leads to better final output because it forces you to refine and clarify your ideas with AI as a collaborative partner.

The "Yes And" Approach of Improv

In improv, when someone says something, the next person builds on it by responding with “Yes, and…” This keeps the conversation flowing and generative. While it’s used humorously in improv, it has serious applications in AI-human interactions by keeping the dialogue evolving and productive.

This iterative dynamic is also key to making the shift from task-oriented AI prompts to process-oriented ones. Task prompts, such as asking AI to generate a list or draft an outline, are limited in their creativity and often result in surface-level outputs. They’re efficient, but lack depth. However, process-oriented prompts, which evolve over time through feedback and iteration, enable deeper exploration and creative breakthroughs.

For example throughout writing this article, I spent 30 minutes daily engaging with ChatGPT, bouncing ideas back and forth. Each day’s dialogue led to new concepts to explore, forming a continuous loop of ideation and iteration. By treating AI as a partner and engaging in process-driven prompts, I was able to refine each draft and dig deeper into the nuances of each section. This iterative process is key to unlocking AI’s true potential in creative work.

Infinite Consequences and Recursive Creativity

In the same way that decisions have first, second, and third-order consequences, human-AI interactions have first, second, and third-order outputs.Each recursive loop improves AI’s contextual awareness, allowing it to generate more nuanced and relevant outputs. By increasing AI’s understanding through iterative guidance, you unlock more significant creative potential.

The Recursive Creativity Loop is how humans and AI collaborate through a process of divergence and convergence.Each stage of the loop relies on the synergy between human insight and AI's computational power. To grasp the essence of this partnership, it's essential to explore how our cognitive strengths and limitations complement each other. By recognizing the balance between AI's processing capabilities and human creativity and emotional depth, we can appreciate how these two forces collaborate effectively.

As AI becomes more embedded in our world, understanding how humans and AI best work together is key. This isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about finding where humans and AI complement each other to create something bigger. The four quadrants help explain these dynamics, showing where humans excel, where AI dominates, and where their collaboration creates the most value.

1. AI Strengths, Human Limitations

AI is a powerhouse when it comes to processing massive amounts of data and handling repetitive tasks. It can analyze information at speeds that humans can’t even begin to match. This quadrant is all about letting AI take over the tasks that would overwhelm human capacity.

However, while AI is great at computation, it’s limited to the rules it’s been programmed with—it can’t step outside those boundaries or come up with new ideas on its own. Humans can focus on higher-order thinking once AI handles the grind.

2. AI Limitations, Human Strengths

This is where humans take center stage. AI can’t replicate our creativity, intuition, or empathy. It might be able to analyze patterns, but it can’t imagine something entirely new. Humans excel in the gray areas—where we need to make decisions that involve emotions, creativity, or complex social dynamics.

When it comes to creating new products, telling stories, or navigating emotional conversations, human strengths are what make the difference. AI can support us here, but it doesn’t lead the way.

3. Human Strengths, AI Strengths

This is the goldmine—the sweet spot where humans and AI work together in perfect harmony. Humans bring their intuition, creativity, and strategic thinking, and AI handles the heavy computational lifting and rapid execution.

In this quadrant, humans guide the process, deciding where to go and what questions to ask, while AI helps them get there faster and with more precision. It’s not about replacing humans with AI—it’s about leveraging AI to make human insight more powerful and effective. This is where the real value gets created.

4. AI Limitations, Human Limitations

This is the danger zone quadrant, where both humans and AI hit their limits. AI is bound by the data it’s been trained on, and when faced with completely new or unpredictable situations, it can’t adapt. At the same time, humans deal with biases and emotional blind spots that cloud judgment.

In these situations, neither humans nor AI can solve problems alone. It’s critical to have checks and balances—both on the data AI is relying on and the human decisions being made. It’s a reminder that collaboration, with both human oversight and AI assistance, is crucial when navigating complex or uncertain environments.

The Economic Impact 

Now let’s bring in Adam Smith. He taught us that dividing labor among specialized workers leads to greater productivity. We’re seeing a new form of that today, but instead of dividing labor between people, we’re dividing tasks between humans and AI.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith also emphasized that self-interest drives economic growth. In this new world, human creativity and intuition are the driving forces behind innovation, while AI handles the repetitive, data-heavy tasks that can slow us down. The biggest economic value—just like in Smith’s vision—comes from finding the right balance between those two forces.

In Quadrant 3, where humans and AI work in sync, we see the next evolution of labor specialization. Humans bring the creative spark and AI amplifies that with speed and precision. Just as Smith showed us that specialized labor creates wealth, this new collaboration between humans and AI will drive the prosperity of the future. We’re not being replaced by machines—we’re working alongside them, each playing to our strengths.

There are those who follow the rules. They check every box, stay within the lines, and operate inside the system. Then there are those who don’t. The ones who push the edges, who refuse to accept what’s possible, who live to shatter the limits placed in front of them. They don’t wait for permission. They create the future.

Think about the teacher sitting in a classroom, wondering how to make her students’ eyes light up. She’s been handed the same lesson plans for years, but what if she broke the mold? What if she used AI to unlock new ways to engage her students, to create lessons that speak directly to their hearts and minds? AI can’t inspire them the way she can—but it can help her reimagine the way education works.

Imagine the aspiring writer, staring at a blank page. He could ask AI for a list of plot ideas, but he doesn’t want just a plot—he wants to tell a story that grips the soul, a story no algorithm could predict. AI can assist, but it can’t craft the depth and emotion that comes from his lived experience.

Picture the entrepreneur who refuses to play by the old rules. Where others see rigid business models, she sees room for innovation. AI can process her data, but it can’t spark the breakthrough that will disrupt her industry. That vision? That’s hers.

AI can calculate, but it can’t dream. It processes, but it doesn’t imagine. It follows the paths we set, but it doesn’t make them. That’s where you come in.

You’re the rule-breaker. The one who doesn’t ask, “What is?” but instead, “What could be?” You see a world full of algorithms and automation, and you don’t fear it. You harness it. You take the raw power of AI and guide it with the force of your imagination.

Where others see boundaries, you see possibility.

AI can assist, accelerate, amplify. But the spark? The soul of every idea? That’s yours. You’re the one who takes AI’s calculations and turns them into breakthroughs. You give it purpose. You take what’s ordinary and make it extraordinary, not because you follow the rules, but because you write your own.

In the end, AI will never outthink you. It will never outdream you. Because while it works within the world of what’s been, you’re focused on the world that’s yet to come. AI is a tool, a force multiplier, but it needs your vision to move past the predictable, the logical, the expected.

The future doesn’t belong to the ones who stay in line. It belongs to the ones who break through. The ones who take a rigid system and bend it toward something new. AI gives you speed, but only you give it meaning.

In a world driven by technology, it’s the boldness of your imagination that stands out. The courage to ask, “What’s next?” and then create it. The willingness not to use AI, not as a crutch, but as a catalyst for the impossible.

This is where the future starts. Not with what AI can do, but with what you will do with it. The real question is.

Take Your Creative Process to the Next Level 

Learn how to integrate AI-driven execution with human ideation. Get our comprehensive guide straight to your inbox.