On the screen to my right, I just noticed what amounts to an advertisement for AI. Someone uploads their resume with the prompt, “Can you make a storybook for my 2- and 4-year-old daughters explaining my career in the style of a coloring book?”
I am not a parent, so maybe this is an unfair criticism, but this seems so utterly hollow. Maybe at those ages, children won’t differentiate between something created by their parent or generated by a prompt. Maybe they won’t even remember these moments. But that hollowing out of creativity doesn’t stop—it bleeds into everything else, especially as we get older, busier, and more consumed by the grind. Yet it’s exactly those bits of effort that are most transcendent and memorable.
When we replace the creativity we expose people to with a cheap, generative imitation, no matter how polished and clean, we teach them that creativity is simply another commodity, that the special spark that binds us together as human beings, as family, is nothing more than a throwaway prompt.
Perhaps I’m being overly judgmental—again, I’m not a parent—but making time to create something for your child, something using your own effort, your mind, your hands, and the bits of you that can’t be expressed in a simple command, those are the kind of “deliverables” that will hold value and foster enduring memories.
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