Brand Happiness
Giving a new meaning to 'Purpose'
INSIGHTS & REFLECTIONS
The New Imagination
in an intelligent world
not less,
Why creativity matters more,
There’s a quiet assumption circulating through culture: that as AI becomes more powerful, human imagination will become less necessary. That machines will ideate for us, create for us, even dream for us. But if anything, AI is revealing a different truth – one that’s both reassuring and challenging: the more intelligence we automate, the more imagination becomes our defining skill.
Imagination has never only been about invention. It’s about interpretation – the ability to read what’s happening beneath the surface of culture, to sense emotional undercurrents before they’re measurable, to see the world not as it is but as it could be. AI can mimic the shape of this, but not the soul.
The New Imagination isn’t about competing with machines. It’s about collaborating with them – using AI to widen the field of possibilities, and human creativity to choose which possibilities actually matter. AI can stretch the canvas; imagination decides the picture.
The New Imagination also asks us to slow down. Not everything that can be generated should be pursued. Not every idea surfaced by a model deserves momentum. The real creative act now is discernment: the ability to resist the infinite in favour of the meaningful.
What emerges is a different kind of creative confidence – one that isn’t threatened by intelligent systems but enriched by them. AI becomes a provocateur, a stimulus, a mirror. But the spark – the unexpected connection, the emotional leap, the cultural intuition – still comes from us.
This is the paradox of the intelligent age: as machines become more capable of producing ideas, humans must become more capable of shaping them. Imagination becomes less about originality for its own sake, and more about intentionality – about expressing something only you, in your specific context and cultural moment, can express.
The New Imagination isn’t louder. It’s deeper.
Not faster. More attuned.
Not limitless. More purposeful.
It’s the intelligence that gives direction to all other intelligence.
And in a world of accelerating possibility, that might be the greatest creative act of all.