In this op-ed, Screen Swap by The Screenery founder Ashlea Vallance explores the impact of AI on creativity, connection and the value of making things by hand.
I had coffee with a friend the other day: he told me that someone he knew used AI at the table to pick what to order from a restaurant menu. The anecdote was tiny. It was funny. But it left me wondering, if we’re happy to outsource even our most basic decisions, such as what to eat, what is that doing to our ability to think creatively, to feel things, and to make choices that are instinctive and innate?
A few days later a post appeared in my LinkedIn feed, a billboard for Back Market promoting refurbished iPod Shuffles with the line ‘zero screen time.’ It resonated with me and the whole ethos of what I am building. It made me think of the current resurgence of 90s parenting, digital detox and going analogue trends. What if all the trends embracing making — the deliberate seeking of physical connection and presence — weren’t nostalgia but a response?
What worries me is not AI, and I’m not saying that AI is bad. I’ve trained in AI. I find it exciting. What worries me is that we skipped a critical, honest conversation about what we’re happy to trade away when we hand more of our thinking and decision-making over to machines.
The trade-off: we know what we’re gaining from AI, but do we know what we’re happy to sacrifice for it?
The way we work has shifted more dramatically in the past five years than in the previous two decades. We pivoted, almost overnight, to remote and screen-based work. Colleagues who used to sit together, grab a coffee and read the room became faces on a screen. We lost something real in that period, and we knew we’d lost it. Yet we struggled to find our way back.
I was nervous about returning to the office. I’d bought a puppy during COVID, so I was one of those people who really wanted to stay working from home to spare my little pup from being left alone for hours. It was only once I got back into the room with my team that my view shifted completely. That reconnection was exactly what I hadn’t realised I needed.
And then AI arrived. But this time, not only are we disconnecting from our colleagues again, we’re disconnecting from ourselves: from our instincts, our choices, our creativity and our presence. That double disconnection is what concerns me most. We had, on many fronts, almost fully recovered from COVID. This time, I’m not sure we’re aware of what we’re trading away.
The promise of AI is clear: save time. Increase productivity. Though in reality, that promise delivers unevenly. Some people are saving hours each week; others have exactly the same workload, or even a higher one, because they’re now cross-checking and quality-controlling AI output on top of everything else. Commercially, the picture is also complicated: in many cases the cost of AI tokens is proving higher than the cost of the human labour it was supposed to replace. Keeping the human in the loop has almost created a double-up in cost for businesses.
As a marketer and a printmaker, I’ve noticed another loss: the colonisation of everyday language. Phrases I would naturally reach for now read as AI-generated and feel unusable. It’s a strange and specific loss that we’re not talking about enough.
There is also a very real anxiety I see in the industry. The phrase ‘pending doom’ has started to appear in conversations and chat groups with worrying regularity. Creatives who have spent careers developing craft and taste are watching AI imitate that skill at scale. While we are seeing improvements in AI creative output — yes, even the fingers — their anxiety is real and specific and deserves to be named.
I also think about the musicians and producers I know from my time in the audio industry, navigating what AI has meant for their craft. The sounds they spent years developing, used to build something that imitates them. It raises real questions about consent, ownership and what we owe the people whose creativity feeds these systems.
The social cost is already present and real. Beyond an individual problem, burnout grows into teams, into culture and into commercial performance. People take more time off, performance slips, and dissatisfaction rises when work feels less like their own. Oxford University Press made “brain rot” its word of the year in 2024, and “rage bait” in 2025 — both symptoms of our time.
Taking the time to revalue what takes time
The single-axis approach — solving one problem at a time — isn’t working, because the constraints interact. You can’t fix team disconnection with another productivity tool. You can’t restore creative thinking by adding another app to the stack. When you lay AI adoption on top of teams that are already fragmented, already screen-heavy and already attention-depleted, the problems compound, and the solution has to operate on a different axis entirely.
At the same time there are signs of balance recalibrating. Ceramic studios and baking classes are full. Screen printing workshops are booked out. Human made, imperfect work is commanding a premium because people can feel the difference between something made with care and output generated at speed.
Across the Screen Swap workshops I run, people tend to fall into three groups. There are those with a creative itch their day job doesn’t scratch — not necessarily artists, but marketers, strategists and project managers who spend their days producing things on screens and have started to wonder whether they’re actually making anything at all. There are those seeking healthy escapism: deliberate, present activities that demand your full attention and block the algorithm. And there are makers from other crafts — ceramics, weaving, knitting, embroidery — curious to try something new.
They can’t always name what’s missing. They just know they feel better after making something with their hands than they did before. One participant told me after a workshop, “That was the best few hours I’ve had to relax and forget all my worries.” She wasn’t talking about the printing. She was talking about being present.
I know because I’ve been her. I’m a perfectionist. I take it from my mum (a Virgo). I remember mum spending hours making an elaborate Easter hat for the school parade one year. There is a photo of a young me wearing it with a completely unimpressed expression. I did not appreciate it at the time. Somewhere along the way, I became my mum.
Like many in our industry, I brought my full perfectionism to my career. I’ve spent two decades in marketing and agencies — across tech, consumer electronics and live experiences, including several years at Sennheiser — working on challenger brands with tiny budgets, where I learned to be resourceful, thrifty and precise, and to craft messages that land in three seconds.
But every time I’ve found myself overwhelmed by all of this, I’ve defaulted to the same places: music, nature and my screen printing studio.
Distinguish creativity from productivity and balance them both.
AI is a quest for perfect, consistent output. Screen printing is the opposite — every print is slightly different, something off centre can create an entirely new colour, and that imperfection is the point. It is also the opposite of fast: mixing, testing, setting up, waiting for ink to dry between layers. You look up. Two hours have passed. You still haven’t finished your first print, but something happens in that slowness. Unlike doom-scrolling which eats away the hours without you noticing, making fully absorbs you in something real. You feel better than when you started.
It’s almost ironic that the organisations that seem to have implemented AI the best were paradoxically the ones who paused before introducing it. Instead of handing people a tool and walking away, they helped their teams understand why and how AI could benefit them specifically. They treated it as an augmentation of human capability rather than a replacement for it.
Context is everything. AI without deep, specific human context produces sameness.
In my workshops, I tell every group not to rush the ink drying by holding the heat gun too close for too long. The temptation is always there. The result is a burnt design, a ruined piece of linen and a lesson learned the hard way. The students who do not listen see it happen. The ones who trust the process see something beautiful emerge.
But this isn’t a call to abandon technology. My call is for balance.
Even if AI does give us a bit more time, what are we doing with it? Are we using it to think more deeply, connect more meaningfully, create more originally? Or are we just filling the gap with more output?
If we never stop to wonder what we’re trading off, we risk losing our ability to decide deliberately, to choose what to eat, what to make, what direction to take. There is joy in deliberating slowly and carefully. We should protect it. Because that space — the slow, the considered, the imperfect — is exactly where creativity lives.
Balance doesn’t require a grand gesture. It can be as small as stepping outside. Touching grass. Getting ink on your hands. Making something imperfect and colourful. Protecting the time that restores us. Deliberately choosing to do so.
The people who feel good about their relationship with technology are not the ones who use it less. They are the ones who use it intentionally and who are equally intentional about the way they step away from it.
It comes back to this simple ethos. Protecting what is most distinctly and irreplaceably us: our original intelligence.
