Creativity in the Age of AI: The curse of knowledge
We all know the slogan “knowledge is power”. In this essay, I want to argue for the opposite: too much knowledge can hinder creativity Not because learning is bad, but because what you already know quietly narrows what you consider plausible. In the age of AI, where solutions are increasingly cheap, this matters: the bottleneck shifts from “finding an answer” to “finding an original direction”. So… should we stay ignorant? Creativity needs ingredients: skills, taste, vocabulary, technique, references. But there’s a trade-off between exploration (searching broadly) and exploitation (reusing what already works) [2]. Expertise pulls you toward exploitation and AI makes exploitation nearly frictionless. ...