Combating Creative Preciousness:
Letting Go of Ego (in the Age of AI)
One of the more quietly destructive myths about creativity is that the best work comes from deep within—the truest self, the unique voice, the singular perspective no one else could possibly replicate. It sounds noble. It sounds romantic. But in practice, it often leads to paralysis.
Why? Because if the work is you, then any flaw in the work feels like a flaw in you.
Letting go of ego doesn’t mean abandoning personal voice or creative ambition. It just means loosening your grip—enough to keep moving, to stay curious, to stop bracing for judgment every time you put something into the world. And as odd as it sounds, AI can help with that. Not because it’s brilliant, but because it breaks the illusion that you have to be.
This isn’t an argument that everyone should use AI in their creative process. Plenty of artists and writers will—and should—continue to work in ways that are personal, tactile, analog, or entirely offline. That’s not only valid, it’s essential. What I want to suggest is simply this: using AI doesn't make your work less authentic. If anything, it might loosen the pressure to be precious—and help you get unstuck.
When the Author Isn’t You
AI throws a wrench into the way we think about authorship. If a sentence came from a prompt instead of your head, does it still count as “yours”? If a melody was sketched by a model, does that make you the composer—or the curator?
That question can feel existential, especially for writers. For decades, we’ve been sold the idea that our voice is a kind of fingerprint—singular, personal, and sacred. But now, a machine can imitate it. Or try a dozen different voices in a single afternoon. That’s not just a technical shift. It’s a psychological one.
And it forces a decision: do you double down on control? Or do you open the window a crack and let some new air in?
When we stop insisting that every idea must originate from deep inside us, we make space for something more collaborative, more agile. The literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay The Death of the Author, suggested that meaning isn’t handed down from a single creator—it emerges in the interaction between reader and text. In a way, AI takes that idea a step further: the origin becomes fuzzy, and what matters is what you do with what shows up. The raw material might be synthetic—but the decisions are still yours.
Feedback Without Fragility
Letting go of ego also changes the way feedback lands. If you’re tightly fused with your work, any critique can feel like an attack. But if the draft was generated quickly—or collaboratively—it’s easier to treat it like what it is: a starting point, not a self-portrait.
There’s a concept in educational psychology that speaks to this—ego-involvement versus task-involvement (Nicholls, 1984). Ego-involved learners link their identity to outcomes; they’re trying to prove themselves. Task-involved learners focus on growth. They’re not trying to be right—they’re trying to get better.
AI nudges us toward that second mindset. When a sentence isn’t quite right, it’s no longer a referendum on your talent. It’s just a sentence. Swap it. Rewrite it. Try again. You’re not defending your honor—you’re working the material.
And that’s what creative work actually is, most of the time: not epiphany, but shaping, reshaping, and letting go of the parts that don’t hold up.
In the Classroom: Egos on All Sides
This tension plays out in schools all the time. Students are often told to “develop their voice,” but within the tight constraints of five-paragraph essays and grading rubrics. They’re taught that their work should be authentic and original—but also polished, compliant, and “correct.” That’s a recipe for ego overload. If the work succeeds, they’re validated. If it flops, they feel exposed.
AI can interrupt that loop. When students use it to generate a first draft or test out an idea, they create just enough distance from the product to take more risks. A clunky paragraph doesn’t mean they’re clunky. It just means they’re in the middle of something. And being in the middle is where learning actually happens.
It shifts the dynamic for teachers, too. Many feel pressure to be the expert in the room—to model mastery, to have the best interpretation, the cleanest draft. But what if the more powerful move is to model uncertainty? To try a prompt on the spot. To say, “This might not work, but let’s see where it goes.” That kind of intellectual humility is rare in classrooms, but students notice it when it shows up. And it gives them permission to think, rather than perform.
In group settings, AI can even neutralize ego turf wars. Instead of competing to be the idea-generator, students can respond to a shared draft. Nobody has to defend it like it’s their baby. The work becomes something they can shape together, not a stand-in for their identity.
Rethinking Voice
The idea of “finding your voice” looms large in creative culture. We treat it like a hidden treasure: buried deep, uniquely ours, waiting to be uncovered. But what if voice isn’t something you find? What if it’s something you build, one decision at a time?
In an AI-rich creative process, voice becomes less about origin and more about discernment. You’re not handing off your work—you’re shaping it in conversation with a tool. Sometimes the tool helps, sometimes it doesn’t. But rejecting it out of hand just to preserve a romantic ideal of authorship may be its own kind of ego trap.
Letting go of ego doesn’t mean erasing yourself. It means stepping back from the need to assert your selfhood in every sentence. You become more like a conductor than a soloist—still in charge, still responsible, but working with more voices than just your own.
And maybe that’s what creative freedom really looks like—not insisting that every part of the work be authored from scratch, but being honest about the many sources that shape what we make, and open enough to let something new emerge.