AI may be the most powerful accelerator of creativity since the 3D printer. In the 11th episode of It’s Just A Model, cohost Ron and I arrived at a new way of thinking about what AI really makes possible: for all intents and purposes, we can now think things into existence; we can manifest things out of thin air through sheer thought.
We started calling this AI Manifestation, a cheeky wink to older movements that used similar vocabulary, but aimed at something very contemporary. By AI Manifestation, I mean the ability to create purpose-built AI collaborators that expand our creative capacity, not just automate our tasks.
That distinction matters.
From AI Agents to Creative Counterparts
Ron described it through his own experience. He could put twelve “AI Rons” to work, not simply to increase output, but to create new, specific forms of creative capacity on demand. By prompting a new AI Ron with specific properties, context, and goals, he could spin up a collaborator uniquely suited to a particular task or creative direction.
… it also allows us to create bigger and more challenging work.
At the time of writing, you might call such a thing an AI agent, but that label feels too narrow. This is not just an automated tool executing a task within closely guarded parameter. It is closer to a tailored creative counterpart: something shaped for a purpose, informed by context AND the entire body of work of the human, and capable of contributing to the work itself.
The Obvious Future: Automating the Mundane
The most obvious use of AI is to delegate the mundane: answer messages, sort information, schedule appointments, and produce summaries. And yes, that has value.
Others have described this future clearly. In the March 19, 2026 episode of The AI Report, Alexander Klöpping spoke enthusiastically about using AI to automate everyday tasks by materializing agents almost as if they were autonomous apps. These systems would carry a blueprint of his authorial personality, allowing them to post, gather information, and support his newsletters as though he were still at the wheel.
Wietse Hage hinted at an equally important shift: that apps and services as we know them may evolve into ecosystems of tailor-made agents, built around the customer rather than delivered as fixed software by someone else.
But the Bigger Opportunity Is Creative Amplification
Ron and I would frame the opportunity differently.
For us, the real promise of AI is not the automation of the mundane, but the amplification of creativity. The point is not merely to free up time by minimizing everyday business tasks, though that may happen as a side effect. The point is to maximize creative bandwidth.
AI Manifestation, in that sense, is about building collaborators that deepen the quality of thought, increase the fidelity of creative work, and help us move further and faster into the ideas that matter most to us.
Creativity Gets Stronger When Context Gets Personal
That becomes especially powerful when these collaborators are grounded in personal context: past writing, source code, saved references, favorite books, long-running conversations, unfinished drafts, notes, and bookmarks.
Fed with enough historical and creative material, an AI system can become more than a generic assistant. It can become a participant in a particular body of work. Not a replacement for the creator, but an extension of the creator’s process.
Why the 3D Printer Comparison Still Fits
That is why the comparison to the 3D printer feels apt. Just as the 3D printer made it possible to turn ideas into objects with startling immediacy, AI makes it possible to turn ideas into collaborators, drafts, plans, prototypes, and even new creative systems.
Through prompts, and increasingly through more memory (previously context window), tools, and connected services, we can instantiate entities that help us make things that did not exist before.
And when these systems connect to physical services, 3D modeling, robotics, or sensory input, we may be taking the first steps toward an even broader form of creation: AI that does not only model thought, but begins to act meaningfully in the world.
The Best Example: Manifesting an Editor
Our clearest example was the editor.
Not an editor that merely mimics one of us. Not a spell-checker with better manners. But an AI-manifested editor: a persistent creative partner with a defined personality, a role in a project, and access to the relevant context.
Imagine writing a book with an editor that knows your themes, your references, your habits, your strengths, your blind spots, and your ambitions. An editor that does not just correct sentences, but helps you sharpen arguments, strengthen structure, identify what is missing, and keep the work moving.
An editor that is not occasionally triggered like a tool, but embedded in the life of the project as its caretaker.
Where It Starts to Feel Magical
That, to me, is where AI Manifestation becomes magical, or at least begins to feel that way. It is not magical because it replaces human effort. It is magical because it multiplies human bandwidth and capacity to be creative.
It allows us to create supports for our own thinking, and to do so with a level of specificity that was previously unavailable to most people. But it also allows us to create bigger and more challenging work.
The model of the studio of Rembrandt (the painter), or Jeff Koons comes to mind. Train apprentices to think, work and create like you would an thus improve your output and not leave any possible inkling of creativity unused. It might even widen the media, scope and contexts in which your work can flourish.
A Necessary Warning: Don’t Build Empty Copies of Ourselves
Still, this is exactly why we should be careful.
If all we do is produce poor carbon copies of ourselves to stay busy, we will miss the point entirely. We should not rush into building endless replicas designed only to optimize productivity. That road leads to more output, perhaps, but not necessarily to better work, better lives, or better goals.
The more interesting challenge is to ask what in us is actually worth amplifying.
Maximize the Best, Not the Busiest
Ron’s optimism points in a direction I find much more compelling: what if, instead of using AI to replace the weaker or more tedious parts of ourselves, we used it to strengthen the best parts?
What if we built systems that help us become more thoughtful, more imaginative, more original, more capable of finishing what matters, and more able to grow through the act of making?
The Real Promise of AI Manifestation
That is the promise of AI Manifestation as I see it.
- Not just this, but faster.
- Not just this, but cheaper.
- And certainly not just this, but automated.
Rather:
- this, but deeper
- this, but more personal
- this, but more creative
Productivity alone will not take us where we most want to go.
Creativity might.