“Excrement…That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We’re not laying pipe. We’re talking about poetry.”
That’s from a classic scene in the film Dead Poets Society. The boarding school’s new poetry teacher, Mr. Keating, played by the late, incandescent Robin Williams, tells the boys to tear out their new textbook’s entire introduction, in which the aforementioned Mr. Pritchard asserts that a poem’s greatness can be formulaically calculated.
I think of that inspiring scene when I hear some of the conversations going on right now about AI, the future of work and education, and the role of creativity.
AI is on everyone’s minds these days. I’m CEO of ad measurement company EDO and chairman of education non-profit Choose Creativity, and I hear about questions and concerns in almost every conversation. As a parent of three still in school, the topic also frequently pops up at family dinners. What does it mean for me and my work? Will it cause harm? Will it try to blackmail me too? How should I prepare my team? How should I teach or raise my children differently for this AI future? Can I get more screen time experimenting with the latest GenAI image tool? (OK, that last one is really just from my kids!)
The answers, I believe, lie not in fear, but in acknowledging and fostering our uniquely human capacity for creativity.
Unlike technology-driven revolutions in the past, AI’s impact on the nature of work will be more pervasive and more complex. The consequences will not be concentrated in a single or several industries, and they won’t break down along traditional lines between blue-collar and white-collar workers. The AI revolution’s impact will be determined by whether the tasks it performs are routine or bespoke. The payroll processor’s work may be much more standardized than the plumber’s, for whom every leak is its own special nightmare. A transition of this magnitude, of course, could be gut-wrenching, and success will depend on a holistic and humane public-private approach.
In a paradigm where anything that can be automated will be, creativity is essential. AI cannot do something that’s never been done before. These models need training data, and they’ve already hit limits, having been trained on everything publicly available on the Internet and large chunks of the world’s proprietary information, too. That’s why the models are so good at computer code and game play – because the models themselves can create more data to train themselves on. They like structured data with definitive outcomes of good, better, and best. They cannot train on something entirely subjective or something that has never been tried before. They certainly cannot experience a truly human life and cannot make new experiences, although there is ongoing discussion about how AI can overcome that limitation — a conversation I find alternately creepy and fascinating.
More importantly, some of the great thinkers about human cognition, like Douglas Hofstadter, whose book Gödel, Escher, Bach has been referred to as the “bible of AI,” and his star student, David Chalmers, now a NYU professor and prominent theorist on how to assess sentience of AI models, are both deeply skeptical of the overhyped claims of many AI enthusiasts about whether these models could ever overtake what makes the conscious human mind so special. Hofstadter is dubious that a dazzlingly good token-guessing machine will ever truly understand its world and reflect on itself as a human mind does. Chalmers also questions premature claims of consciousness in current AI models, but doesn’t dismiss the possibility in the next decade. (Not entirely coincidentally, Hofstadter is receiving a Choose Creativity Award with Chalmers presenting it on June 3, 2025 in NYC.)
At my company, EDO, we’ve built a thriving business on applying vertical AI models to measure behavioral outcomes from Convergent TV advertising, and we feel strongly that AI cannot replace creative judgment. AI-driven data can help you figure out what works, but it’s human understanding that can get to the truth of why. Any claim that a formula can mathematically derive how or why one creative works and another doesn't should be treated like Mr. Pritchard's poetry introduction and tossed in the dustbin. Nor can AI replace taste. An LLM could create millions of iterations of Shakespeare’s last unwritten play, but it would never know which one, if any, was great. It cannot discern the profound from the merely proficient.
Call it whatever you want — judgment, wisdom, taste — we’re going to need it in spades, across all facets of our lives. At our non-profit, Choose Creativity, we work hard to reorient traditional education’s bias that creativity is solely about art and deserves only a small and optional slice of time. Creativity is a growth mindset. Creative confidence has been shown in research to lead to improved outcomes in education and work, as well as healthier lives that are more resilient to adversity and trauma. We know that creativity can be taught, nurtured, and grown when inherently creative children share a common language of creative principles with the adults in their lives.
My co-founder and wife, Marina, taught kindergarten in public schools for many years and developed the Choose Creativity curriculum as an organic outgrowth of how she was raising our children. As parents, we’ve encouraged our kids to understand how various technologies – from YouTube how-to videos to social media to LLMs – fundamentally work, what they are good for and what their downsides might be, and then barter time with these technologies balanced against other healthy offline activities. For AI in particular, they need to understand what it can do and what it does not replace – their own creative skills, from solving problems to spotting opportunities. We’ve seen with our kids that there is a learning curve. They need a vision for what they want from the AI tool and need to learn how to articulate their prompts effectively, iterating as if the AI tool were a brainstorming partner. That type of vision, communication with AI models, and the judgment to evaluate the output will be a new set of skills for children (and frankly, society’s future workforce).
The ultimate conclusion is both sobering and inspiring: creativity is at the core of our humanity. As colleagues in media and advertising, as educators shaping future minds, and as parents guiding our children, we must recognize this truth. We owe it to our customers, partners, kids, and communities to embrace AI as a useful tool in its many forms. We also owe it to ourselves to nurture the very quality that defines us.
Back to Robin Williams in that memorable scene from Dead Poet’s Society, having shocked his new students and another teacher passing by, he gets to the point: that an algorithm can’t tell you anything about poetry, about the creative magic of what really stirs the human soul and reflects the beauty, suffering, and dignity of the human experience.
Let us, as citizens, as professionals, and as parents, embrace the challenge to educate and empower the next generation not just to understand AI, but to transcend it through imagination, judgment, and the boundless adaptive capacity of the human spirit.