Redaction of a Concept: An AI Warning for Creatives
This is an interesting time for creatives.
We have a new tool that can be very useful and very easily misused.
Pay attention to AI rewrites and redesigns. Make sure your voice is not lost in the homogenization of correct punctuation and smoothed-out logic.
The trouble starts when “cleaner” becomes the same thing as “better.”
A sentence can be awkward on purpose.
A pause can carry a thought.
A strange turn of phrase can be the part people remember.
AI can preserve the gist while quietly scrubbing away the wit and fingerprints.
Take this line from Oscar Wilde:
> “The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
I can imagine an editor looking at that and deciding it needs help. Perhaps: Your beauty changed the world.
Clear. Correct. Also, it sounds like it came free with a greeting card.
Wilde’s line has a little vanity, a little danger, and a very particular way of seeing the world. The curves of someone’s lips do not logically rewrite history. That’s why the line works. It makes you stop for a second and see what the writer saw.
Or take Lewis Carroll’s famous line:
> “I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
It has a conversational lilt. It feels like someone thinking out loud and then finding the thought as they say it.
A rewrite could easily turn it into:
We cannot return to the past because we have changed.
That version is tidy. It also sounds like a Sunday morning sermon rather than a pithy line of copy with a point of view.
The same thing happens with visual redesigns.
A tool can make a layout look polished while removing the odd little decision that gave it character.
It can turn a lively page into a very well-behaved page.
The page may pass inspection.
It may even be easier to explain.
But does it still have a point of view?
Does it make the viewer stop and think?
I use tools to explore ideas, get unstuck, and see possibilities I might not have reached on my own.
But the tool needs direction.
It doesn’t know which imperfection is the idea.
It doesn’t know which joke is worth keeping, which line should stay a little crooked, or why I chose that word instead of the more respectable one.
That judgment belongs to the person creating the work.
So read the rewrite closely.
Look at what changed.
Check whether the tool kept your meaning, and check whether it kept your voice.
If the sentence is suddenly wearing a suit you would never buy, ask why.
You can accept the edit.
You can reject it.
You can steal one useful piece and put the rest back where you found it.
AI may call itself a creative director, but is it? Don’t let it think for you.
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