Infinite References: Is AI Making Creatives Less Curious?
Creative people were curious partly because they had no choice. Finding references was slow, and the slowness dragged them through material they were not looking for.
That is the part worth examining. Nobody browsed an annual for the pleasure of browsing. They browsed it because there was no search box, and somewhere around the third irrelevant page they saw a photograph from an unrelated category that solved a different problem entirely.
What Instant References Remove
A model returns what was asked for. That is the whole value, and it is also the whole cost. The detour is gone, and the detour was where the unfamiliar material came from.
Search engines started this and AI finishes it. Ask for something in the style of a thing you already know, and you receive a competent version of a reference you already had. The loop closes on itself.
You cannot be surprised by an image you described in advance.
Where The Detour Went
It has not vanished so much as become optional, and optional things get dropped under deadline. The archive, the annual and the unrelated category are all still there. Nothing forces anyone through them now.
Whether This Actually Matters
It is possible this is nostalgia. Plenty of celebrated work came from people who were extremely well-read in their own field and nowhere else, and the industry has produced derivative work in every era with no help from technology.
The honest version is narrower. AI has not made anyone less curious. It has removed the tax that used to force curiosity on people who did not have it naturally. Those who go looking anyway now have a real advantage, because everyone else is describing what they already know, and a room full of people describing what they already know produces work that looks like everything else in the category. Related: Is AI Making Advertising More Creative Or More Predictable?