AI Didn’t Kill Creativity. It Killed Your Excuses.

The moment people want to quit is when their taste finally outruns their ability. They can suddenly see how bad their own work is. Most people stop right there.

You get into creative work because you love great work. You’ve watched the movies, listened to the podcasts, read the essays, scrolled the feeds. Your taste is actually pretty good. That’s the problem. For a long time, your output won’t live anywhere near your standards. You’ll make things that are trying to be good, that want to be good, but just aren’t.

That gap—between what you can see and what you can ship—is where most creative dreams quietly suffocate. Not from haters, not from the algorithm, but from private embarrassment.

The Gap That Kills Dreams

Ira Glass explained this perfectly in a clip that’s become lore among creators.

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. You want to make TV because you love TV. There’s stuff that you just love. So you’ve got really good taste.”

The trap springs from there. Your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is “kind of a disappointment to you.” You can tell it’s “still sort of crappy.”

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people quit right there. The internal critic wins because the internal critic has better taste than the internal creator—at first.

Eight Years of Sucking

Glass doesn’t just talk theory. He shares an embarrassing clip from his eighth year at NPR. Not a beginner. Eight years in. And it’s brutal.

“I wrote this,” he admits, listening to his own terrible radio segment about corn and tortillas in Mexico. “I don’t even understand what it is.” The writing is incomprehensible. The delivery is unnatural—he was underlining every third word for emphasis, making it sound completely robotic.

That same guy now hosts This American Life. Peabody Award winner. 1.7 million weekly listeners. The show that defined a genre.

His advice: “You will be fierce. You will be a warrior. And you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be.”

The Only Way Through Is Through

Glass’s prescription is brutally simple: “Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story.”

Create artificial accountability. Find someone waiting for your work, even if they don’t pay you. Because only by going through volume do you close the gap between taste and ability.

I learned this the hard way. Back in 2019, I wrote: “My first video is far from perfect, so it was hard to decide to release it—but I also know I need to push through how bad it is initially and just ship it.”

Fuck perfection and figure out what you can make. Get good at making. Love the craft.

The only way to get good is to be bad first—and be bad a lot.

No more excuses: Everyone has killer tools

So the filter is still the same: who’s willing to live in the gap between taste and ability long enough to cross it?

AI just moves the excuses out of the way. You don’t get to say “I can’t edit,” “I don’t know how to code,” or “I’m not technical.” Those are solvable now. Intelligence is officially too cheap to meter. Your taste is your evals. Your desire to win is your agency. That’s all you need.

What’s left is the real question: are you willing to make a lot of imperfect things, in public, on a schedule?

Push through. Ship the ugly version. See and feel the pain of the person you’re trying to make something for. Use AI to raise your floor and increase your reps, not to pretend you’re a genius. If you do that, the gap closes—faster than it did for any previous generation.

And if you don’t, it wasn’t AI that killed your creativity. It was your excuses.