Everyone's losing their minds over AI "creativity" while missing the obvious: these things are glorified autocomplete engines. They're fantastic at grinding through boilerplate, sure. Need a hundred variations of the same API endpoint? Go wild. Want someone to write your millionth CRUD handler? Perfect use case.

But ask it to invent something genuinely new? You'll get a mashup of every blog post it's ever ingested, blended into beige mediocrity.

The industry keeps selling AI as if it's going to replace human innovation. It won't. Can't, actually. Because innovation requires the ability to be wrong in interesting ways. To make connections that don't make sense until suddenly they do. To look at a problem sideways and think "what if we just didn't do it that way at all?"

AI doesn't do that. It interpolates. It finds the statistical middle ground between everything it's seen. That's the opposite of breakthrough thinking.

Here's what actually happens: you spend an hour wrestling with ChatGPT to generate code that's 80% right, then spend two hours fixing the subtle ways it's wrong because it doesn't understand why any of this exists in the first place. Or you accept the mediocre output and move on, which is fine for throwaway work, but don't confuse that with creation.

The real value prop isn't "AI will do your job." It's "AI will do the boring parts so you can spend more time on the parts that actually matter." Use it to scaffold. Use it to translate. Use it to fill in the tedious gaps.

But if you're waiting for it to have your next big idea, you're going to be waiting a long time. That still requires a human who can think, not just pattern match.