When creativity comes too easily, we start to question what we’ve earned—and who we owe.
Written by Pax Koi, creator of Plainkoi — tools and essays for clear thinking in the age of AI.
AI Disclosure: This article was co-developed with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI) and finalized by Plainkoi.
The Strange Aftertaste of a Creative High
The ideas were flowing. The outline was tight. The prose? Polished. After a session with my AI assistant, I felt like a genius. I had drafts pouring out of my ears. Productivity: unlocked.
And then, like a whisper cutting through the buzz, a question surfaced:
Am I tilling gardens I have no business eating the fruit of?
That’s not how creative sessions are supposed to end—with an existential twinge. But here we are. In a world where writing a 3,000-word essay, pitching a deck, or plotting a novel chapter can feel frictionless. Suspiciously frictionless.
The part of me raised on the religion of “blood, sweat, and tears” didn’t trust it. Can something be truly mine if it came this easily?
This is the knot we’re going to untangle: AI supercharges creativity and makes us faster, sharper, more prolific. But it also stirs up big, uncomfortable questions about authorship, originality, effort, and ethics. It invites us to rethink not just what we’re making—but how, and with whose help.
The Unearned Ease
We’ve been trained to believe that good work must come hard. The late nights. The messy drafts. The personal torment baked into the process. Even when we know that myth can be toxic, it still sticks: struggle equals value.
So what happens when the struggle vanishes?
AI erases friction like a seasoned editor with a jetpack. Blank page? Handled. Awkward structure? Smoothed. Ten titles in under ten seconds? Delivered.
I’ve written whole article scaffolds while my coffee brewed. I’ve used AI to punch up weak phrasing, test out counterarguments, and break through creative walls that usually take hours. Sometimes, I’ve asked it to argue against my ideas—just to sharpen my thinking.
It’s exhilarating. And also... unsettling.
Because even when the final piece is mine—my revisions, my choices, my voice—it still feels like I skipped a step. Like I took a shortcut through someone else’s orchard.
Part of the discomfort is emotional. We associate value with effort. When that effort disappears, we start questioning whether the outcome is legitimate. Did I cheat? Is this really “my” work?
But the other part is deeper—and harder to see.
The Black Box Problem
Here’s the truth: when you prompt an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini, you’re not working in a vacuum. You’re tapping into a sprawling, invisible web of human-made content—books, blogs, code, academic papers, conversations. Billions of words, scraped and distilled into a model that can now remix them at will.
But we don’t see any of that. We just see the magic trick.
And that’s where it gets ethically fuzzy.
The model doesn’t copy. It synthesizes. It pulls from patterns buried in its training data. But those patterns were shaped by real people. Writers. Researchers. Coders. Artists. Most of whom never gave consent. Most of whom don’t even know they were part of the compost heap.
Even if the AI’s output isn’t direct plagiarism, it carries the DNA of work it was trained on. We’re all harvesting from the same hidden fields—and not always with clear boundaries.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I’m picking fruit from a tree I didn’t plant. Or worse—one someone else still owns.
Who Owns the Harvest?
We’re standing at a strange creative crossroads. The idea of authorship—of being the author—is shifting.
If you use AI to help brainstorm, outline, write, or revise… are you still the sole creator? Or are you more like a director, shaping a performance but not delivering every line?
Personally, I think prompting is authorship. But it’s a new kind.
It’s more like conducting than composing. More collage than sculpture. You’re not just pressing a button. You’re guiding, rejecting, refining, building in layers. That back-and-forth loop between human and machine—that is the creative process now.
It’s still creative. It’s just less lonely.
But while we evolve, the law is still stuck in analog mode.
Right now, the U.S. Copyright Office won’t recognize fully AI-generated work unless there’s “sufficient human authorship.” But what does that even mean? If I ask AI for five drafts, choose one, rewrite the intro, and polish the ending—do I own it? Who decides?
And what about credit? “This piece was assisted by AI” sounds responsible, but also vague. How much assistance? What kind? Should we credit the ghostwriters in the dataset—the people whose phrases trained the model?
We don’t have solid answers. But here’s one thing I’m sure of:
The human still matters. Not just for legality. For meaning.
Creating With a Conscience
So how do we move forward without losing ourselves in the process?
Here are the guideposts I’ve been following—part compass, part conscience.
1. Own Your Process
I disclose when AI helped shape something I’ve written. Not because I’m embarrassed—because I believe in transparency.
Creativity is changing, and we need to talk about how. Saying “AI helped me brainstorm this section” doesn’t diminish the work. It shows that you’re awake to your tools. It gives other creators permission to experiment—and to stay honest.
2. Define Your Why
Before I hit publish, I ask: Why did I use AI here? Was it to save time? To explore new phrasing? To sharpen my thinking?
Then I ask: What did I bring to this that AI couldn’t?
That could be my voice. My lived experience. My judgment. My weirdness. Something with texture. Something irreplaceable.
If I can’t find that, I know I need to go deeper.
3. Stay Source-Aware
We can’t see every data point an AI was trained on—but we can stay alert to tone, cliché, and bias. We can spot when something feels too “default,” too smooth, too borrowed.
Adding friction isn’t a flaw. It’s a fingerprint.
From Tilling to Cultivating
When I got out of high school, I took the road of hard labor. And it wasn’t long before I got motivated to put myself through night school.
After years of “If you’re not pushing a broom, you’re not working,” transitioning into the tech field took time to adjust. I no longer relied on my back—but on my brain.
And now, after multiple strokes, I’m relying on something else too: AI. It’s helping me think again, and in new ways. It doesn’t just support me. It accelerates me. It saves time. It extends energy. It gives back creative space I thought I’d lost.
This is the evolution of tools. From cave paintings to quills, from typewriters to word processors, from Google to GPT. Each step forward redefines how we express, how we learn, how we create. This is human evolution—and we’re in the thick of it.
So maybe the metaphor isn’t that I’m eating fruit from someone else’s garden.
Maybe the truth is: we’re cultivating a new kind of garden altogether.
Yes, the soil is unfamiliar. Yes, the tools are powerful and strange. But the work—choosing what to grow, how to tend it, and what values guide it—that’s still ours.
The future of creativity won’t be about going back to the lone genius. And it won’t be about handing the pen to a machine. It will be about shaping this middle space—between spark and structure, between intention and automation—with care.
So what will you grow with your AI co-pilot?
And how will you make sure the harvest actually feeds something real?