When AI becomes part of a creative or educational process, those human dimensions do not disappear. In many ways, they become more visible. Someone still has to decide what is worth making, why it matters, who it is for and how it should be interpreted. The system may expand the field of possibilities, but it does not give those possibilities meaning on its own.
This is one of the key ideas behind AI-SECRETT’s Mission, Vision & Values: artificial intelligence is not approached as a neutral instrument that simply executes tasks, but as part of a wider socio-technical environment. It influences how knowledge is produced, how creativity is understood, how cultural value circulates and how professionals learn to act within changing digital, social and ecological transitions. From this perspective, co-creation with AI cannot be reduced to pressing a button, receiving an answer and moving on. It asks for a more active relationship between people, technologies and contexts.
“Co-creation with AI becomes meaningful when it is a dialog, not a delegation.”
— Javier Rubio Gómez, CEICE
That involvement begins even before generation takes place. It begins with purpose. What is worth making? Why does it matter? What should it express, teach, question or open? These are not purely technical decisions. They are creative, educational, ethical and cultural ones. A system can suggest directions, but it cannot decide what should be meaningful within a specific community, audience or learning environment.
Federica Antonucci (KEA) points to this responsibility when she writes that “we should always decide what to create, why, and whether the output aligns with ethical, cultural, and personal value.” Her reflection highlights a crucial layer of AI-supported creativity: the human role is not only to evaluate whether something works, but to decide whether it should exist in the first place, and under what conditions.
This is especially important in creative and cultural fields, where meaning is rarely generic. A text, image, design, lesson or audiovisual piece does not carry value only because it is well produced. It carries value because it speaks from somewhere, towards someone, and within a context that gives it significance. AI can accelerate production, but acceleration does not automatically create meaning.
“It’s meaningful when AI changes how you think, not just how fast you produce.”
— Matteo Nicolosi, Inspiring Futures Europe
This shifts the conversation away from speed alone. If AI is only used to produce faster, the process may become more efficient, but not necessarily more reflective. If it is used as a partner for contrast, exploration and questioning, it can become part of a richer creative process: one that opens alternatives, tests assumptions and helps people look again at what they are trying to say or build. This does not mean removing all difficulty from creative work. In fact, some of the most valuable parts of creation are not smooth at all. They appear in false starts, hesitations, revisions, disagreements and moments where an easy answer does not feel right. Matteo also warns that if AI removes too much of that friction, we may end up with work that is “fluent, competent, and very forgettable.”
That names one of the risks of AI-supported creativity very well. The danger is not only poor-quality content. Sometimes the danger is content that is perfectly acceptable, technically polished and emotionally empty: work that sounds right but says little, follows familiar patterns but does not take a position, or avoids the difficult and situated decisions through which creative value is built. This is where judgement becomes central.
“The greatest risk is not that AI replaces creativity, but that people gradually delegate reflection, interpretation, and decision-making.”
— Víctor Fernández Pallarés, University of Valencia
This reflection moves the debate beyond a simple replacement narrative. The concern is not only whether AI can produce something that resembles creative work. It is whether people remain active enough to understand, challenge and take responsibility for what is produced. Judgement is not a final check at the end of the process. It is present in every meaningful decision: choosing a direction, recognising a weak assumption, protecting a cultural nuance, rejecting a convenient suggestion, adapting a result to a specific audience, or deciding that something should not move forward.
In practical terms, co-creation with AI requires an active role. Flavio Moriniello (UPV) describes it as a process in which “the human should actively guide, question, edit, and interpret the output instead of simply accepting what the system produces automatically.” These actions may sound simple, but they define the difference between passive use and meaningful co-creation. Guiding, questioning, editing and interpreting are not secondary tasks. They are part of the creative work itself.
They also protect something that several partners identified as essential: voice. When AI systems become part of everyday workflows, one risk is that creative professionals gradually adapt to what the system offers most easily. Suggestions may become safer, faster or more familiar. Styles may become smoother. Differences may become less visible. Over time, the professional voice can be diluted, not through a dramatic replacement, but through a quiet accumulation of convenient choices.
Javier Rubio Gómez describes this risk as “creative dilution”: drifting toward outputs that are efficient and polished, but no longer truly one’s own. His reflection reminds us that voice is not only a matter of style. It is also a point of view, a sensibility, a way of understanding what is worth saying and how it should be expressed. This connects directly with the broader purpose of AI-SECRETT, which does not frame creative professionals as passive users of AI systems, but as people capable of critically understanding and shaping how these technologies enter creative, cultural and educational environments.
“One of the main risks is confusing productivity with creativity.”
— Pedro Mújica, — Pedro Mújica, LPGA
This distinction is becoming increasingly important. AI can help produce more, faster and with higher technical quality. But creativity is not only productivity. It involves intention, context, doubt, sensitivity and the ability to decide what should not be created. In a world where content can be produced almost instantly, creative responsibility is not only about making. It is also about restraint, interpretation and care.
The future of AI-supported creativity will therefore depend not only on what systems can generate, but on what people learn to do with those possibilities. Can they use them to think more deeply? Can they bring them into dialogue with cultural diversity, social responsibility and educational purpose? Can they resist the easiest answer when it is not the most meaningful one?
As Pedro Mújica summarises, “the challenge is not to generate more content, but to preserve and strengthen human meaning in a world where content can be produced almost instantly.” That challenge is at the heart of AI-SECRETT’s approach. AI can expand the field of possibilities, but it is people who decide which possibilities matter, how they should be shaped and what kind of creative future they help to build.
