Creatives are the new athletes

AI is structurally changing our world. There is a shift happening in the way we work that can feel unsettling. Our self-image is being challenged. What are humans still good for? Where do we still bring value to the world of tomorrow? Does it still make sense to study? In this article I try to shed some light on these questions.

A conversation that stayed with me

A friend told me last month that he wasn't sure his degree meant anything anymore. He is thirty-two, a designer, good at what he does. He had just watched a founder on LinkedIn brag about replacing his entire creative team with one AI workflow.

Maybe I picked the wrong career.

He said it half-joking. He wasn't really joking.

I have heard variations of this conversation a dozen times in the past year. At birthdays. At work. From a parent who doesn't know what to advise his teenager to study. From a law student who looks at the contract-review tools her future firm just rolled out and quietly wonders what her first five years are going to look like. The feeling underneath all of it is the same: if the models keep getting better at producing the work, what is left for us?

It is a fair question. And it deserves more attention than the takes I keep scrolling past. The replacement boasting, the doom-posting, the comfortable handwaves of "humans will always adapt." People are anxious, and they are right to be paying attention.

What's in the air

The headlines aren't helping. Layoff announcements that cite AI as the reason keep hitting new highs, and founders post "before and after" team sizes on LinkedIn like trophies.

And underneath the headlines, we find the more difficult conversations. The friend who wonders if his diploma still counts for anything. The parent who doesn't know what to tell his kid to study. The freelancer whose phone is ringing less than it did a year ago.

The question sharpens: if AI can produce the work, what is the work?

This is not the first time

It helps to remember we have been here before.

When the steam engine arrived, craftsmen thought their craftsmanship was lost. It wasn't. Value shifted upward, from making the thing to designing what the machines should make. The one who could imagine, specify, and direct found a bigger canvas than ever.

When mass production took over, everything became uniform and affordable. People feared a world of sameness. Instead, value shifted again, toward choosing what should be produced. The era gave us figures like Dieter Rams, whose ten principles of good design weren't about how to manufacture but about how to decide.

When the internet made distribution free, we thought content would become worthless. It didn't. Value shifted toward relationships, trust, and ecosystems. The blog post was free; the community around it wasn't.

The pattern is the same each time. Human value moves up one level of abstraction. From doing, to choosing, to giving meaning. What was once valuable becomes a commodity. What was once invisible becomes the real work.

If this pattern holds, and it has held for two centuries, the question isn't whether our value will shift. It's where to.

But there is one crucial difference this time, and it would be naive to gloss over it. The steam engine took generations to reshape labour. Mass production took decades. The internet took a couple of decades. AI is doing it in years, possibly months. The shape of the curve may be familiar, but the speed isn't. The people living through this transition have far less time to retrain, rethink, or rebuild than any generation before them. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to be deliberate, and to start now.

Production was never the moat

Here is the uncomfortable thing AI is forcing us to admit.

An accountant used to think his value was in being able to do accounting. In reality, he was selling trust and judgment. A designer thought her value was in producing beautiful designs. In reality, she was selling taste and the right questions. A developer thought his value was in writing code. In reality, he was solving the right problem.

Production was only the visible part. The real value always sat in judgment, taste, context, and meaning.

Because production took time, we mistook time for value. A report that took three days felt more valuable than one that took three minutes. But our value was never in the three days.

AI is making visible what was always true.

Fifteen years ago, Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, made a related observation: software was never the moat, because software could always be copied. The real defensibility lived in ecosystems, hardware, and relationships. What was true for software companies then is true for everyone doing production work now. The output is not the moat. It never was.

"But my clients are doing it themselves now"

An entrepreneur who used to hire a designer is now building her own website with AI. A self-employed worker who used to call his bookkeeper is now doing it himself with an AI assistant. For a lot of skilled professionals, this feels like loss, and on the surface, it is. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But look closely at what those clients are actually doing.

They are building the website they already wanted. They are keeping the books the way they always kept them. They are moving faster inside a frame they already had. The frame itself doesn't change.

A few years ago I wrote about an idea I had borrowed from the philosopher Michel Foucault. He argued that the most effective form of power is not to restrict people but to shape them, giving their lives direction without their noticing. He drew on Bentham's panopticon: a structure designed for total surveillance, where eventually the watchers can walk away, because the discipline has been internalised. I extended his picture to a playground. The playground has a slide, a sandbox, a football. It also has fences. After a while, the children stop seeing the fences. The playground simply becomes the world.

The fences don't need to be hostile to be effective. They only need to be invisible.

For most people, AI works the same way. They use it to move faster inside their familiar playground. Not to see the fence. Not to ask whether they need a website at all, or what problem they are actually solving.

And this is exactly where the lasting value of skilled professionals lives. Not in doing the work the client can now do themselves, but in seeing the fence. An experienced designer can say: "Your website isn't the problem. The problem is that you don't know who you are." An experienced bookkeeper: "Your books are clean, but your business model is leaking money in four places you can't even see."

That is not work a prompt delivers. That is work that only comes from years spent inside a craft.

AI is a mirror

There is a story going around that sounds reasonable but is fundamentally wrong: "Why study anymore if AI knows everything?"

Guillermo Rauch put it sharply on Twitter the other day:

AI is an amplifier of your intellect and values. A mirror of your soul.

One of the most accurate observations I have read.

Give two people the same AI tool and you will get fundamentally different results. The doctor with twenty years of experience asks questions a student can't even formulate. The seasoned entrepreneur sees through generic output. The good writer uses AI as a sparring partner; the inexperienced one lets AI do the work and publishes mediocrity.

The tool is identical. The difference is in what the user brought to it.

Creativity is intelligence having fun, someone once said. But intelligence is not an empty vessel. It is fed by knowledge, experience, and the frameworks you carry in your head.

Think of AI as a beautiful flute. Two people pick it up. One produces noise, the other produces music. The difference isn't in the flute. It is in what the player absorbed before they ever held it.

But knowledge does more than improve your output.

Knowledge lets you choose, deliberately, when to break the rules. The biggest breakthroughs in history often came from people who knew the rules of their field so thoroughly that they knew exactly which one to break to solve a problem.

Picasso painted abstractly only after he had mastered classical painting. Bauhaus designers stripped away ornament only after studying the history of decoration. The difference between breaking rules out of ignorance and transcending them out of insight is, entirely, knowledge.

And book knowledge alone isn't enough. People knowledge matters just as much. Conversations with people who think differently from you. Travelling to places that show you your "normal" isn't universal. Time spent in worlds outside your own field.

A designer who never spoke to a manufacturer designs work that can't be built. A developer who never spoke to an end user builds elegant software no one can use. An entrepreneur who never travelled sees opportunities only through the lens of his own market.

This is the paradox. On the surface, AI looks like it makes education obsolete. In reality, it makes deep knowledge, both book knowledge and people knowledge, more essential than ever.

AI amplifies what you bring. Bring nothing, and you get nothing back.

Studying, certifying, going deep, travelling, having conversations with people who don't look like you. This is how you become the player, instead of someone who picks up a flute and makes noise.

Creatives are the new athletes

I owe this phrase to an Amsterdam brand called The New Originals. They make what they describe as performance clothing for creatives, and "Creatives Are The New Athletes" (CATNA) runs through their work like a thesis. The line lands harder the longer you sit with it. Here is why.

We have cars that drive faster than any human can run. Cranes that lift more than any team can carry. Computers that calculate faster than any brain. And yet, millions of people watch athletes every week. Why?

Not because a sprinter is more efficient than a car. He isn't. We watch because we want to see human excellence. Someone bringing body, mind, and years of dedication together in a single moment.

In a world where AI commoditizes production, creative professionals become like athletes. Not because they are faster than AI, but because they are something else than AI.

"Creative" here is broad. It is the bookkeeper who actually understands an entrepreneur. The teacher who sees a child. The developer who understands the problem before writing any code. The manager who intuitively senses what her team needs. Anyone who adds meaning to output is a creative.

And like athletes: they are shaped by discipline and taste. They invest in rest and deliberate practice. They actively seek out the edges of their familiar frame. They train to think outside their own playground. They have coaches, teams, and ecosystems around them. Qualities that don't scale through copy-paste. That don't come from a prompt.

Not because we are faster than the machines. Because we are something else than the machines.

What this means in practice

Two handholds.

1. Invest in taste, not speed. AI makes production faster. Your value is in which output you choose, and why.
2. Bring more to the tool. Books, conversations, the people you don't normally talk to. AI is a mirror; what comes out reflects what you brought to it.

Closing

My friend, the designer, the one who half-joked that he might have picked the wrong career, is still designing. He is also doing something he didn't used to do. He is sitting in longer conversations with his clients before he opens any tool. He is asking better questions.

He is making fewer things. The things he makes matter more.

The feeling you started with, of becoming obsolete, only describes the production part of your work. And that was never where your value lived.

Creatives are the new athletes. Not because we are faster than the machines, but because we are something else than the machines.

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With thanks to The New Originals (Amsterdam) for the line that gave this piece its title, and for building a brand around the idea long before the rest of us caught up.