THE GRAIN: AI vs. Creativity

For the last few years, I’ve been exploring AI and creativity, but the longer I do this, the more I find myself asking a more fundamental question: What is creativity in the first place?

Increasingly, I’m interested in what happens before the idea: the mess, mistake, collision or unexpected connection that sends us somewhere we weren’t planning to go.

We could call that chaos.

That’s what brought me into conversation with author Lisa de Nikolits and artist Erik Mohr.

Lisa’s new suspense novel, That Time I Killed You, was partly inspired by Erik’s painting series Chaos Interrupted, images of ordinary objects caught in moments when something has gone wrong, such as fallen flowers, a broken vase, a lemon meringue pie smashed on the floor.

Lisa and Erik originally met while working together on a creative project. Years later, Erik made the paintings. They entered Lisa’s imagination and eventually found their way into her novel.

One creative act collided with another and became something neither person could have entirely planned.

So I invited them onto the podcast to ask: What if chaos isn’t something creativity has to overcome? What if chaos is where creativity begins?

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Why uncertainty is essential to both of their creative processes

* Why Erik paints broken things instead of perfect ones

* How being disturbed by art can spark something new

* Whether our increasingly optimized lives leave enough room for creative mess

* What happens when AI enters a process built around uncertainty

* Can AI be creative and offer meaningful ideas

* Whether AI can generate genuine chaos or merely patterns

* What courage and vulnerability have to do with making something truly your own

Generative AI is extraordinarily good at giving us something that looks finished. But both Lisa and Erik describe creativity as something that emerges precisely because they don’t know where they’re going yet.

Maybe the question isn’t only whether AI can be creative. It’s whether, as AI makes it easier to move directly from idea to outcome, we are preserving enough uncertainty to remain creative ourselves.

Chaos Sparks Creativity on September 2

Lisa and Erik will continue the conversation in person at Chaos Sparks Creativity, the launch of That Time I Killed You, moderated by Heather J. Wood.

Wednesday, September 2 at 6:30 p.m.BookBar, 600 Markham Street, TorontoFree and open to everyone. Reserve your spot here

You can buy That Time I Killed You here or at your favourite retailer.

About Lisa & Erik

Lisa de Nikolits Toronto-based, South African-born author whose work spans crime, thriller and speculative fiction. Her latest novel, That Time I Killed You, is a domestic noir about murder, secrets and the instability beneath seemingly ordinary suburban life. You can subscribe to Lisa’s Substack, A Turn of Phrase, here.

Erik Mohr is a Toronto-based painter and award-winning creative director whose work finds meaning in overlooked people, objects and everyday scenes. His Chaos Interrupted and other paintings explore the stories contained in things that are broken, discarded or disrupted.

I hope you enjoy the conversation, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

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Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

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Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

Recently, I moderated a panel at the VRTO Spatial Media Conference about the evolution of value in the age of AI. One of the panelists was Allen Lau, co-founder and former CEO of Wattpad, and now co-founder and Operating Partner at Two Small Fish Ventures.

Allen has already lived through an earlier version of the abundance debate we’re having about AI today.

Wattpad launched in 2006 with a radically open proposition: anyone with a story could publish it and reach an audience. By the time the company was acquired in 2021, the platform had grown to 100 million monthly users, with one million chapters being uploaded every day, in more than 50 languages.

Long before generative AI, the publishing industry worried that opening the gates would overwhelm readers with mediocre writing. But remarkable stories still surfaced. Writers built enormous communities, readers helped determine what mattered, and stories that began on Wattpad became bestselling books, films, and television series.

So I invited Allen onto the podcast to ask: What happens to value when everyone can create?

What I found especially interesting is that Wattpad wasn’t only dealing with an abundance of human creativity. It was also using AI years before ChatGPT, to help discover them. The platform combined audience engagement, community response, and data to identify work that was resonating and might translate into books, films, or television.

In this conversation, we discuss:

* What Wattpad learned from making publishing available to everyone

* Why audiences were often drawn to authenticity over polish

* How communities and algorithms influence which stories become visible

* Whether AI diminishes creative value or moves it somewhere else

* Why Allen believes ideas still have to come from humans

* What becomes scarce when content becomes abundant

* Why this may be a golden age for creators, and who risks being left behind

So many good ideas die not because they lack value, but because they never have the chance to surface. Allen is deeply optimistic about AI’s potential to change that. He believes it can remove barriers, help people express ideas beyond their existing technical skills, and turn creative people into what he calls “superheroes.”

But greater access also means greater competition. When everyone can create, our finite time and attention become even more valuable.

That tension sits at the centre of this episode: If creative production becomes nearly limitless, how do we decide what deserves our attention, and who gets to decide?

I hope you enjoy the conversation, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Subscribe to support THE GRAIN

Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now.

Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the VRTO Spatial Media Conference at OCAD University about the evolution of value in the age of AI. One of my panelists was Anthea Foyer, who leads the Creative Technology Office at the City of Toronto.

I found her ideas fascinating. Partly because I didn’t really know the City of Toronto had a Creative Technology Office. But mostly because of the way Anthea thinks about creativity, technology, and public life. She talked about embracing the weird, she talked about convening, and she talked about what happens when we stop treating AI as a force that is simply happening to artists and start asking how creative communities might actually help shape what comes next.

So, obviously, I invited her onto the podcast. Anthea’s office supports Toronto’s creative technology sectors, including immersive media, video games, esports, and emerging forms of digital entertainment. She is also the city’s focal point for Toronto’s UNESCO City of Media Arts designation and a co-founder of Future Makers, a creative foresight initiative developed with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School.

What interested me most was how Anthea and her colleagues have changed the way they bring AI into conversations with creative people. When you invite people to an event about AI, she says, they often arrive with a position already formed. They’re excited. They’re angry. They’re worried. They’re skeptical. So instead, Future Makers began asking people to imagine the future of their creative industries. AI was still in the room.

It just wasn’t always the headline. That shift opened up a much more interesting question:

What kind of creative future do we actually want to make?

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Why conversations about AI become so polarized

* What happens when artists actually get to touch and test the tools

* The difference between art made by AI and art made by artists using AI

* Whether algorithms are expanding creative possibility or making culture more homogenous

* Why Toronto should make more room for the strange, experimental, and weird

* The role cities can play in AI adoption

* Why convening people across disciplines may be one of the most important things we can do right now

One idea from Anthea that lingers with me: technology can start to feel like an inevitable force being done to us.

But technology is something humans created. We can play with it and question it. We can decide where it belongs and where it doesn’t. We can advocate for different systems and regulations. We can bring different people into the conversation. And, maybe most importantly, we can keep making things.

Anthea believes Toronto has a particularly interesting opportunity right now. We have creative people, researchers, universities, AI expertise, business leaders, and public institutions. Her argument is that we need to get more of those people into rooms together to convene, to connect, and to make more room for the weird.

I hope you enjoy the conversation, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Subscribe to support THE GRAIN

Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now.

Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

Recently, the federal government released its new national AI strategy, AI for All. I downloaded it, printed all the pages, and sat down with a highlighter. What interested me wasn’t just the policy itself. It was the story Canada is trying to tell about AI. The strategy is built around words like trust, literacy, adoption, and sovereignty. It assumes that AI will become part of our lives, our workplaces, our schools, and our economy.

But as I read, I kept coming back to a few simple questions:

* Trust for whom?

* Literacy for what?

* And adoption on whose terms?

To help unpack it, I invited Joe Castaldo onto the podcast. Joe is a business journalist at the Globe and Mail who has spent the last several years covering artificial intelligence, including Canada’s emerging AI policy.

What I appreciate about Joe’s reporting is that he doesn’t approach AI as either magic or doom. He’s interested in what is actually happening: where the technology is useful, where it’s falling short, and what questions still remain unanswered.

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Canada’s new AI strategy and its focus on adoption

* Whether AI literacy automatically leads to trust

* The government’s $50 million creative technology fund

* Copyright, consent, and training data

* What meaningful support for artists and creators might look like

* Why AI feels inevitable to some people, and why others resist that framing

One line from the conversation is lingering with me: Joe notes that the strategy assumes Canadians should be using AI, but never fully explains why.

That question sits at the centre of this episode.

If AI is becoming infrastructure, then understanding it isn’t just about learning a tool. It’s about understanding the values, assumptions, and tradeoffs being built into the future around us.

I hope you enjoy the conversation and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Links to stuff we talk about:

* AI for All: Canada’s new AI strategy [ISED Canada]

* Ottawa’s new AI strategy includes more than $2.3-billion for training, adoption and startups [Joe Castaldo, The Globe and Mail, gift article]

* Joe Castaldo, The Globe and Mail [Reporter profile]

Subscribe to support THE GRAIN

Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now.

Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

The other night I went to hear journalist Karen Hao speak about her book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, presented by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, at the University of Toronto.

I started reading the book after interviewing Ian Krietzberg, AI correspondent at Puck News, who strongly recommended it.

Hao’s reporting examines the power structures shaping the AI industry, who builds these systems, who profits from them, and the often unseen infrastructure behind them.

As a creative, what will likely stay with you as it did with me, is the hidden labour behind AI: the data labeling, training datasets, and the massive amount of human labour required to prepare the data that models learn from. Alongside this are the ongoing copyright debates around the material used to train these systems.

These are parts of the AI ecosystem that most creatives rarely encounter directly, even though they shape the tools we’re increasingly using in our work, and the more we use them, the more rooted these systems become.

You may not arrive at all the same conclusions Hao does, but investigative perspectives like this add vital context to the broader conversation about AI and creativity. I believe these are conversations we as creatives need to be having so that together, we can work to shape them.

At THE GRAIN, I’m interested in bringing many different viewpoints into that conversation, from builders, to artists, to critics and researchers, because the story of AI is about us, and the systems we increasingly use.

I’d be curious to hear from creatives working with AI tools:

What part of this ecosystem do you think we should be paying more attention to right now, the technology itself, or the infrastructure behind it?

Generative AI has made a lot of creatives nervous, not just about jobs, but about individual expression.

Marian Bantjes isn’t new to this kind of disruption. As an artist, illustrator, designer, and writer, her work has always pushed against polish, taste, and convention. If you know her book I Wonder, you know her voice is unmistakable.

What interested me most is that Marian began experimenting with generative AI early, back in 2023, before it became slick or predictable. Instead of being overtaken by the tool, she treated it the way she treats any material: critically, playfully, and with intent.

We talk about kitsch, hallucination, repetition, and failure, and why early AI’s weirdness mattered. We talk about what AI can generate, and what it still can’t do: make lateral leaps, form nuanced metaphors, or replace lived experience.

This is a conversation about where ideas come from, and why strong creative voices don’t disappear when new tools arrive.

If you’re trying to figure out how to work with AI without losing yourself in the process, this episode is for you.

Links to stuff we talk about:

* marianbantjes.com [Personal website; Design Art Gallery]

* AI: Part 1 [Substack, Marian Bantjes]

* Jonathan Hoefler [Typographer]

* Rodney Brooks [Roboticist]

* Douglas Coupland [Artist]

* Stuart Semple [Black 2.0 paint]

* Edel Rodriguez [Illustrator]

Subscribe to support THE GRAIN

Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now.

Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

The photo industry has been running on gut feelings for years. Heather Morton and Rob Haggart brought receipts.

They’re the team behind the new State of the Photo Industry Survey, a rare, data-driven look at how photographers are actually making a living, right now.

Heather is a professor in the Honours Bachelor of Photography program at Sheridan College, mentoring students entering an industry flirting with existential crisis. Rob is a former magazine photo editor and the founder of the APhotoEditor and Photo Folio, long-running platforms focused on the business of photography. If you’ve worked in editorial or commercial photography, you’ve almost certainly encountered his work.

They both live and breathe photography and after decades of guiding, teaching, and connecting photographers, they are deeply invested in the health of this industry.

What caught my attention is that the survey didn’t even ask about AI directly and yet it still shows up, especially where people feel most uneasy about their future.

This episode isn’t simplified into a pro-AI or anti-AI stance. Rather, we foster a nuanced, practical conversation about the business of photography, and the real feelings behind it.

If you’re a photographer, hire photographers, teach photography, or are trying to figure out what future you’re walking into, this one’s for you.

Links for more detail:

* State of the Photo Industry Survey [Substack, Heather Morton]

* HM Photo Prof [Instagram, Heather Morton]

* APhotoEditor.com [Blog, Rob Haggart]

* APhotoEditor [Instagram, Rob Haggart]

Subscribe to support THE GRAIN

Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now.

Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at [email protected] Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok

Ian Krietzberg is one of the clearest, most grounded voices covering AI today.

As the AI correspondent at Puck, and former editor-in-chief of The Deep View, Ian approaches artificial intelligence the way a great reporter approaches any powerful system: by following the money, interrogating the incentives, and keeping the human impact front and centre.

At a moment when AI is framed as an inevitable technological destiny or a geopolitical arms race, Ian’s work brings the conversation back to something essential: curiosity, freedom of information, and the people behind the machines.

He also exposes a truth many in creative industries have felt but struggled to articulate: AI is often tested on creatives first because our work is considered “low risk” meaning technically easy to scrape, culturally abundant, and generally low risk.

His newsletter The Hidden Layer traces how decisions made by developers, CEOs, users, and regulators shape the technology we interact with every day.

Our conversation digs into why AI is not a mystical force but a human invention, how media hype distorts our understanding of it, and why the real stakes aren’t in model benchmarks but in the lives touched, changed, and sometimes harmed by these tools.

This is AI reporting with humanity, clarity, and courage.

Links of stuff we talked about…

* The Hidden Layer [Puck]

* The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking [Shannon Vallor]

* Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI [Karen Hao]

Listen now, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation at the edge of AI and creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Stay tuned for my grains of thought in the newsletter, for news and insights on how AI is impacting the creative industry worldwide.

Read more about THE GRAIN at thegrain.ai and get in touch with me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Sarah Thompson is one of the sharpest strategists working in Canadian communications today.

The executive managing director at Glassroom started her career wanting to be a journalist, spent years in and around newsrooms, and now works at the intersection of advertising, media investment and strategy for some of the biggest brands in the country.

She’s also part of Canadian Media Means Business, an industry-wide push to rethink how media is funded and valued here at home.

Sarah led a groundbreaking new study called “The Economics of Media and Advertising in Canada,” which finally follows the money—from advertisers to publishers to jobs to GDP, and lays out just how interconnected our media ecosystem really is.

If you’re interested in conversations like these, and live in the Toronto area, join me at THE GRAIN Speaker Series premiere event on Wednesday, Nov. 12, at which a panel of guests will talk about Advertising vs. AI. Click here for more information.

Links of stuff we talked about…

* Canadian Media Means Business [report]

* Task Force on Canada’s AI Strategy [public engagement sprint]

* Glassroom [Humanise Collective]

Listen now, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation at the edge of AI and creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Stay tuned for my grains of thought in the newsletter, for news and insights on how AI is impacting the creative industry worldwide.

Read more about THE GRAIN at thegrain.ai and get in touch with me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Season 3 of THE GRAIN Podcast kicks off with world-renowned AI researcher and generative AI pioneer Dr. Maya Ackerman. She is the CEO and co-founder of WaveAI, the company behind LyricStudio and MelodyStudio, two groundbreaking tools that use AI to support human creativity, rather than replace it. Dr. Ackerman is also a computer science professor and a leading voice in the global conversation on how humans and machines make art together.

Her new book, Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us, coming out October 14, (available for pre-order) is a must-read for any creator curious about how AI collides with creativity. I’ve been scribbling all over my advance copy because her insights and frameworks lit up so many new ideas for me.

In our conversation, we dig into agency, co-creation, and what it really means to make art with machines. It’s thoughtful, energizing, and the perfect way to start the season.

Links of stuff we talked about…

* Dr. Maya Ackerman [personal website]

* Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us by Dr. Maya Ackerman [published by Wiley]

* WaveAI [Creative AI for musicians]

Listen now, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation at the edge of AI and creativity.

You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube.

Stay tuned for my grains of thought in the newsletter, for news and insights on how AI is impacting the creative industry worldwide.

Read more about THE GRAIN at thegrain.ai and get in touch with me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.