Genuine Creativity Is the New Competitive Moat in the AI Era

Summary

This opinion essay argues that generative AI is making competent execution, professional-looking design, and standard product features increasingly easy to reproduce. The author compares today’s LLM-generated websites with the Flash era, when an awkward and inaccessible technology nevertheless encouraged designers, artists, and non-programmers to experiment with animation, interaction, games, and unusual web experiences. Flash was eventually discontinued in 2020, but the Flashpoint archive lists 157,509 preserved works, illustrating the scale of that creative period. By contrast, many AI-generated sites look ordinary because language models were trained on an internet full of conventional design, and the people prompting them often make few meaningful creative decisions. The essay cites an April 2026 study that found about 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated by mid-2025, and notes that Y Combinator applications rose from 20,000 to 27,000 per batch between 2022 and the end of 2024 before the program expanded from two batches a year to four in 2025. The author says a defensible advantage is therefore not a single novel idea, which competitors can copy, but a habit of repeatedly questioning assumptions and inventing new solutions. AI can accelerate prototyping, critique, and iteration, but humans must decide which problems matter, distinguish useful insight from nonsense, and preserve accessibility and sound standards. Experimentation will produce failures, yet tolerating those failures is presented as necessary for discovering valuable ideas.