Every year on 21 April, World Creativity and Innovation Day invites us to celebrate human ingenuity. Traditionally, that meant celebrating creativity through art, science, and new ideas. Today, it also means asking a more uncomfortable question.
This is no longer theoretical. AI-generated images have already won competitions, exhibitions increasingly feature algorithmic works, and creative teams across industries use tools like Midjourney or DALL·E as part of their daily workflow.
For organisations, the issue is practical. Because how people perceive meaning directly shapes how they value what you produce.
Recent research co-authored by ESCP professor Olesia Nikulina offers a useful lens to understand this shift. The key insight from the paper is simple: when AI enters the creative process, people stop focusing only on the final output. Instead, they start looking at how it was made.
Why the process suddenly matters
In the past, a piece of work was judged largely on what you could see: a strong visual, a striking campaign, a well-crafted narrative.
The process behind it rarely became part of the evaluation.
This is changing. Consider the backlash around AI-generated artworks entering competitions. The criticism is rarely about the visual quality. It is about authorship. Who actually created this? How much was done by the human?
When AI is involved, the output alone no longer answers these questions. Two pieces that look equally polished can be judged very differently depending on how the process is described.
For creative teams, this creates a new constraint. Producing good work is not enough. The human role has to be visible.
What actually drives perceived meaning
The research points to three concrete levers:
- How the work is guided: when a creator provides detailed, thoughtful input to AI, the result is perceived as more meaningful. This signals intention. It shows that the output did not emerge by accident, but was shaped.
- Who finishes the work: Interestingly, meaning is less about who starts and more about who ends. When the human is seen as applying the final refinement, the work is judged as more meaningful and more valuable. When AI produces the final version, the opposite happens.
- Selection: showing that a human chose one option among several AI-generated alternatives increases perceived meaning. The act of choosing is interpreted as creative judgment.
Taken together, these elements point to a broader shift. Meaning is no longer attached only to originality in the output, but also to the visible human involvement in the process.
What this changes in practice
Many organisations approach AI as a way to produce more. More content, more variations, more speed. That logic is understandable, but it can backfire.
When outputs appear to be generated with minimal human input, they risk feeling interchangeable. This is already visible in workplaces dealing with large volumes of AI-generated material that look finished but require checking and correction.
The issue is not the technology itself. It is how its use is perceived.
To maintain value, organisations need to rethink not just production, but presentation. This can mean showing iterations rather than only final outputs, making explicit who made key decisions, and ensuring that human judgment is clearly present at the end of the process.
A different role for creativity: from making to curating
Traditionally, creativity has been associated with producing something from scratch. AI unsettles that idea.
Take the now well-known case of the AI-generated image that won a prize at the Colorado State Fair. The controversy was not about the image itself. It was about the process. People questioned whether selecting and refining outputs from Midjourney counted as “creating”.
That reaction is telling. When a tool can generate dozens of variations in seconds, the hard part is no longer producing the first version. It is deciding what deserves to exist. What to keep, what to refine, what to discard.
This is where human creativity now sits. People attribute more meaning to work when they can see those decisions. Not just the output, but the judgment behind it. Curation is no longer a secondary step. It becomes the core of the job.
The takeaway
AI does not make creativity disappear. It makes it more visible in different places.
Instead of asking “who created this?”, people increasingly ask “who decided this was the version to keep?”
On World Creativity and Innovation Day, that is a useful shift to keep in mind.
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