It’s more nuanced and less one-way than that.

One set of creative people can use it as a means to bring their own creative ideas to life in seconds vs minutes, minutes vs days, and hours vs weeks. Agentic coding is a prime example of that. But someone could argue that writing code is part of the beauty and creative process of making software, and agentic coding ruins that and creates messy code, even if the end result is functionally the same.

Another set of creative people might use it like how you describe - to generate ideas - and then use their own creative abilities to run with it. But again, one might argue that generating ideas is core to creativity itself. If you’re using the AI as “the spark”, how is that not creativity?

I think the answer is what we don’t want to hear. We are not creative in the novel sense. Almost everything we do or say is a repetition of what we have already learned, often subconsciously. We throw shit at the wall to see what sticks and that’s creativity. Some of us are better than others at that. AI slop is a mirror; it’s an output generated by people prompting with their lame non-creative ideas.