Is AI making us more creative, or just better at churning out digital noise?
That question hit me a few weeks ago, after I stumbled across a podcast on the a16z website: “Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software.” Rubin, a legendary music producer, was riffing on creativity through vibe coding, and I couldn’t help but listen.
Then I dove in, headfirst.
Before that, I’d been using AI the way most people do: tweaking emails, tightening up social media posts, making myself a bit more efficient.
But was I improving anything, really?
What have I found in this vibe coding experience? Yes, I can do more than generate quick marketing-oriented messages. I can create web pages and lead generation funnels with limited coding experience. Now I can also write more and more creative prompts to generate reams of output in minutes rather than hours.
But am I really “pushing the envelope” or am I just continuing to “feed the beast”? Yes, the same beast we’ve fed called Social Media over the past 2 decades.
Lately, I’ve been asking whether AI really saves me time, or just serves as a pretty good, inexpensive assistant that saves a few rounds of ideation when I don’t have another human to bounce ideas off of?
Or is it directing my thoughts and output and getting me to produce what it knows or needs to understand? To hell with what I really need?
Watch your AI. Does it constantly ask “Oh, and one more thing”? I’ve decided that when I get this, my AI can’t produce what I’ve asked in my prompt. Ask it. It will fess up. And when it admits it, it’s time to move on.
Sure, it’s fast if it knows what to do and has the data to take you where you need to go. But watch it. It could be feeding you a load of misinformation while it learns from your questions, your data, knowledge, and experiences.
Productivity isn’t always progress.
Which makes me wonder — Our culture has become so addicted to speed and results that we’ve forgotten the importance of quality.
Human experience can’t be easily reproduced. This ingredient will start to be missed as we crank out so much worthless, subpar content.
We really are creative beings. It seems to me, though, that we are far more greedy than creative. It no longer seems that there is a moral code that limits what we’ll create next. If it makes a buck, great! Damn the consequences and downstream impacts to the greater society. Right?
So what happens when the jobs really do disappear—and our leaders still dodge the question of what a living wage even means? Have you heard anyone in power talk about this with urgency? Me neither. Maybe that’s the real silence echoing in those empty Congressional chambers.
If we keep chasing speed and scale, what kind of world are we actually building? And when the noise finally dies down, will we recognize what’s left—or wonder if we’ve automated away the very things that made us human?
Jon Fisher, Sunday, March 8, 2026