Yoel's Lemonade Stand: AI and the Death of Creative Excuses

A friend of mine, a composer who writes Orthodox music, told me something fascinating last week.

He said the new AI music generators can now produce perfectly adequate *niggunim.” Perfect pitch, proper modal structure, even authentic emotional cadences.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked him.

He laughed. “Write better ones.”

This, I think, captures something essential about our current moment. We’re witnessing what I call The Great Flattening – where artificial intelligence is leveling the creative landscape, and only those with genuine elevation will remain visible.

Demand for my surfaces has only increased since AI has come out

Before you think this is another hand-wringing editorial about robots stealing creative jobs, let me suggest something counterintuitive:

AI might be the best thing to happen to real creative work in decades.

Here’s why.

The Baal Shem Tov Principle

When the Baal Shem Tov revolutionized Jewish prayer in the 18th century, the scholarly establishment was horrified.

Here was a man who couldn’t match their Talmudic erudition, whose followers danced and sang instead of sitting in silent contemplation, who emphasized joy over juridical precision.

The scholars missed the point entirely. They focused on technique – the proper pronunciation, the exact timing, the scholarly apparatus. The Baal Shem Tov understood something deeper: when everyone can master the mechanics of prayer, what matters is whether you actually have something to say to the Almighty.

AI is doing the same thing to creative work that Chassidism did to Jewish learning. It’s making authenticity the only currency that matters.

When everyone can generate competent prose, design decent graphics, or compose serviceable melodies, the tools become irrelevant. What matters is what you do with them.

Tools Reveal, They Don’t Create

Photography didn’t kill painting. It freed painters from the burden of mere representation and gave us impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism.

The camera forced artists to answer a deeper question: “If machines can capture reality perfectly, what can only humans express?”

The same principle applies today. When AI can simulate knowledge, it can’t simulate your specific journey through life.

When machines can process information, they can’t process wisdom.

When algorithms can recognize patterns, they can’t recognize meaning.

Your experience plus your interests plus your struggle equals your perspective. That equation is uniquely yours, and no amount of computational power can replicate it.

The Beautiful Constraint

In Jewish tradition, we understand something about constraints breeding creativity. The strictest forms – the most prescribed prayers, the most regulated observances – often produce the most profound spiritual innovation. Why? Because when the framework is fixed, all energy goes toward finding new depths within it.

AI presents us with a similar constraint: When technical execution becomes trivial, vision becomes everything.

This terrifies most people, which is precisely why it should excite you.

The Death of the Creative Middle Class

We’re witnessing the elimination of what I call the creative middle class – those who succeeded by being competently derivative. You either have something to say or you don’t. You either have perspective or you parrot. You either create or you curate.

The middle ground, where you could build a career by being technically proficient but conceptually unremarkable, is being automated out of existence.

This sounds harsh until you realize it’s liberation. The creators who are panicking right now should panic. They’ve been exposed. But if you have something real to say, AI just handed you the greatest gift: an audience desperately seeking substance in an ocean of generated sameness.

Your Anti-Flattening Protocol

First, audit your uniqueness. Write down ten ideas you’ve had that you’ve never seen anyone else express. Can’t think of ten? You have work to do. And that work isn’t learning better prompts.

Second, develop your own language. Create frameworks, concepts, and vocabularies that emerge from your unique way of seeing the world. These can’t be replicated because they’re born from lived experience, not pattern recognition.

Third, use AI as a multiplier, not a replacement. Let it handle research, technical execution, and rapid prototyping. But never let it substitute for your core insights. That’s like asking someone else to live your life for you.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Every morning, before you create anything, ask yourself: “Am I saying something only I can say?”

If the answer is no, dig deeper. If the answer is yes, use every tool at your disposal – including AI – to amplify it.

The robots aren’t coming for your job. They’re coming for your excuses.

In our tradition, we have a concept: tikkun olam – repairing the world. Real creative work has always been about this kind of repair, about seeing what’s broken and imagining what could be whole.

Machines can optimize it. They can iterate it. They can even surprise us with novel combinations.

But they cannot repair the workd. They cannot imagine wholeness from brokenness. They cannot transform pain into beauty or confusion into clarity.

That’s still our job.

It always was.

Welcome to The Great Flattening.

May the most interesting people survive.