Sam Altman's prediction on human creativity
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
Sam Altman sat down with Ben Thompson for 40 minutes this week, and buried between infrastructure deals and chip supply chains was something far more interesting, for us at least: OpenAI’s CEO genuinely believes we’ve been underestimating how many people want to create things.
When Sora launched, over 30% of active users were creating content, not just consuming it. That’s a radical departure from the internet’s old 90/9/1 rule (90% lurkers, 9% occasional contributors, 1% active creators). Altman’s thesis is simple: that ratio wasn’t human nature, it was friction.
“There is so much latent creative expression demand in the world. If you give people tools that let them go quickly from idea to creative output, that hits at some very deep human need.”
Turns out, even “easy” tools like Instagram or TikTok still required too much—knowing which filter works, understanding basic composition, having a sense of pacing and rhythm. The barrier wasn’t access to tools; it was the skill floor required to make something you weren’t embarrassed to share. AI doesn’t just lower that floor—it removes it entirely. You go from idea to output without needing to know how anything actually works.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for professional creatives: if everyone can generate a decent video, illustration, or campaign concept in seconds, what exactly is your job?
Are you a curator now, sorting through AI outputs for the gems? A taste-maker who knows which direction to push in? A systems designer who builds the right prompts and workflows? Or maybe something we don’t even have a name for yet—part director, part collaborator, part quality controller for an increasingly democratized creative process. The tools are solving the “how to make it” problem faster than we’re solving the “what makes it good” problem.
The convergence should tell you something: this is the new standard interface for building AI agents. Text-based or voice-based, simple or complex, if you’re deploying agents for customer-facing workflows, you’re going to need this kind of structured approach. The question isn’t whether these tools matter—it’s whether you understand your conversation flows well enough to use them effectively.
Start by mapping one workflow on paper. Customer support routing, lead qualification, appointment booking—pick something repetitive that currently lives across Slack threads and spreadsheets. If you can diagram the decision points and handoffs clearly, you’re ready for these tools. If you can’t, the fancy visual interface won’t help you. The tooling is here. The work is understanding your process well enough to build it.
Maybe the answer isn’t about making better things at all. Altman keeps circling back to something else entirely: creative work, in his view, is fundamentally social—it’s about the feedback loop, the collective appreciation, the shared experience. That’s why Sora launched as a social app rather than just a production tool. The shift for professional creatives might not be from maker to curator, but from top-down creator to facilitator of collective experiences. Less “I made this brilliant thing, now witness it” and more “I’m creating the conditions for something meaningful to emerge and be shared.”
The bottleneck won’t be making things—it’ll be knowing which things are worth making in the first place.
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