Creativity is how we make a life.
It’s a parent inventing a game on a rainy afternoon. A friend finding the words that make someone feel understood. A neighbour seeing a gathering place where there used to be an empty room.
To us, creativity means imagining possibilities and shaping them into something meaningful. It brings our memories, taste, curiosity, and care into the world. It helps us question what exists and decide what could come next.
You don’t need to call yourself a creative person to value that. Your particular way of noticing things is worth making room for.
When answers become effortless,
make room for the effort.
AI can help us get unstuck, explore unfamiliar subjects, and turn a rough thought into something we can use. There is real value in that assistance.
It also makes it easy to skip the first attempt: sitting with a question, reaching for an idea, finding another, and deciding what you believe. Our concern is what happens over years if we keep handing those moments away.
We may become more accustomed to choosing from suggestions and less accustomed to generating our own. Shared starting points may also leave less room for the unexpected differences between us. These are risks we want to investigate; the long-term effects on independent creativity remain an open question.
The more we outsource our thinking to AI, the less we practice it ourselves. Over time, that ability can weaken. Tend exists to help us build it back.
The first possibility
can still come from you.
Give your thinking somewhere to grow.
Tend makes space for about six minutes of your own thinking. You generate possibilities, follow a new constraint, then choose and improve an idea. We build that practice around five skills:
- Generation
- Let more than one possibility take shape.
- Divergence
- Find a direction beyond your first instinct.
- Association
- Connect things that don’t usually belong together.
- Reframing
- Change the question, the constraint, or the point of view.
- Judgment
- Choose what matters, explain why, and make it better.
AI’s place in our approach comes after your attempt: to question, challenge, and help you reflect. You get the first word. The goal is to keep curiosity and judgment active alongside the tools you use.
Your garden marks the time you give to that practice. Every completed session adds a leaf. Missed days leave your growth intact.
A belief to explore.
Questions to keep asking.
Research gives us reasons to pay attention. These two studies examine creative output and reported thinking habits; neither establishes that AI causes lasting loss of creativity.
Better stories. More similar starting points.
In a short-story experiment, access to AI ideas improved ratings of individual stories, while the resulting stories were more similar to one another. It raises a question about collective variety, rather than demonstrating long-term change in a person’s ability.
Read the creativity studyConfidence in AI changes the work of thinking.
A survey of 319 knowledge workers found that greater confidence in AI was associated with less reported critical thinking. The study also described a shift toward checking and integrating AI output. It measured self-reported experience, not cognitive decline.
Read the critical-thinking studyWe’re building Tend with the same curiosity. We want to learn whether a small, regular practice helps people think independently in unfamiliar tasks and everyday problems. That benefit needs to be tested. A growing garden, or a higher idea count, is not proof on its own.