In recent years, an underlying sense has emerged that algorithmic culture is shallow, cheap, and degraded in the washed-out manner of a photocopy copied many times over.

But I’m also beginning to think that generative AI shouldn’t even be considered a creative tool at all and I think we may have really gotten off on the wrong foot by talking about it like one. I’m willing to go so far as to say generative AI, as it currently exists, is just productivity software. Case in point, Adobe’s Firefly.